After this course, you will:
- have a profound understanding of one specific debate in theoretical linguistics;
- be able to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches and understand their predictions;
- understand which psycholinguistic means are available to test these predictions;
- be able to contribute to setting up and running a new experiment;
- be able to report on all relevant aspects of the experiment in a way that is appropriate within the field.
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Syntacticians aim to discover what the underlying structure of sentences looks like. How do we combine words to form phrases and sentences, and how do we account for the difference between what a speaker considers grammatical and ungrammatical? By looking at linguistic data, theoreticians formulate explicit claims about what they think our mental representations of language look like.
As in any scientific debate, these claims are contested, with linguists disagreeing on the right theory. Sometimes the question is not so much which syntactic theory is correct but whether a syntactic theory is needed at all to explain a certain phenomenon. Maybe the difference between what is grammatical and what is not is explained much better by understanding the way in which we process language, or by taking into consideration the properties of our cognitive systems. It can be very useful in these debates to see if we can run psycholinguistic experiments in order to decide which approach makes the best predictions.
In this course, you will have a detailed look at one current debate and see how experiments in the lab have been used to advance our knowledge. In the second half of the course, we will together design a new experiment. As a student, you will thereby obtain hands-on experience with (parts of) the empirical cycle: formulating a hypothesis, designing materials, testing participants, analysing & interpreting the data, and documenting the process. |
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