3 Developing the Thesis or Dissertation Proposal

Some Common Problems

The general purposes and broad format of the proposal document havenow been presented. There remain, however, a number of particular points that cause a disproportionate amount of difficulty in preparing proposals for student-conducted research. In some cases, the problems arise because of real difficulty in the subtle and complex nature of the writing task. In other cases, however, the problems are a consequence of confusion, conflicting opinions, and ambiguous standards among research workers themselves and, more particularly, among university research advisors.

As with many tasks involving an element of art, it is possible to establish a few general rules to which most practitioners subscribe. Success in terms of real mastery, however, lies not in knowing, or even following, the rules but in what the student learns to do within the rules.

Each student will discover his or her own set of special problems. Some will be solved only through practice and the accumulation of experience. While wrestling with the frustrations of preparing a proposal, you should try to remember that the real fascination of research lies in its problematic nature, in the search for serviceable hypotheses, in selecting sensitive means of analyzing data, and in the creative tasks of study design.

Some of the problems graduate students face cannot be solved simply by reading about them. What follows, however, is an effort to alert you to the

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most common pitfalls, to provide some general suggestions for resolution of the problems, and to sound one encouraging note: consultation with col- leagues and advisors, patience with the often slow process of “figuring out,” and scrupulous care in writing will overcome or circumvent most of the problems encountered in preparing a research proposal. In the midst of dif- ficulty, it is useful to remember that problems are better encountered when developing the proposal than when facing a deadline for a final copy of the report.

The problems have been grouped into two broad sections: “Before the Proposal: First Things First” and “The Sequence of Proposing: From Selecting a Topic to Forming a Committee.” Each section contains a number of specific issues that may confront the student researcher and provides some rules of thumb for use in avoiding or resolving the attendant difficulties. You should skim through the two sections selectively, because not all the discus- sions will be relevant to your needs. Chapter 4 (“Content of the Proposal: Important Considerations”), Chapter 6 (“Style and Form in Writing the Proposal”), and Chapter 7 (“The Oral Presentation”) deal with specific tech- nical problems and should be consulted after completing a review of what follows here.

Before the Proposal: First Things First

Making Your Decision: Do You Really Want to Do It?

The following idealized sequence of events leads to a thesis or dissertation proposal.

1. In the process of completing undergraduate or master’s level preparation, the student identifies an area of particular interest in which he or she proposes to concentrate advanced study.

2. The student selects a graduate institution that has a strong reputation for research and teaching in the area of interest.

3. The student identifies an advisor who has published extensively and regularly chairs graduate student research in the area of interest.

4. Based on further study and interaction with the advisor, the student selects and formulates a question or hypothesis as the basis for a thesis or dissertation.

Because we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, few students are able to pursue the steps of this happy and logical sequence. For a variety of reasons, most students have to take at least one of the steps in reverse. Some

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even find themselves at the end of several semesters of study just beginning to identify a primary area of interest, in an institution that may be less than per- fectly appropriate to their needs, and assigned to an advisor who has little or no experience in that particular domain. For this unfortunate state of affairs, we offer no easy solution. We do believe that one significant decision is, or should be, available to the student—the decision to do, or not to do, a research study. Faced with conditions such as those described above, if the option is available, the more rational and educationally profitable course may be to elect not to undertake a research study. You can determine whether this option is available before the school is selected, or at least before the program of study is selected.

There are sound reasons to believe that experience in the conduct of research contributes to graduate education. There also are good and sub- stantial reasons to believe that other kinds of experiences are immeasurably more appropriate and profitable for some students. The question is, “Which experience is right for you?”

If you are, or think you might be, headed for a career in scholarship and higher education, then the decision is clear. The sooner you begin accumu- lating experience in research activities, the better. If you are genuinely curi- ous about the workings of the research process, interested in combining inquiry with a career of professional service, or fascinated by the problems associated with a particular application of knowledge to practice, again the decision is clear. An experience in research presents at least a viable alterna- tive in your educational plans.

Lacking one of these motives, the decision should swing the other way, toward an option more suited to your needs. Inadequately motivated research tends not to be completed or, worse, is finished in a pedestrian fash- ion far below the student’s real capacity. Even a well-executed thesis or dis- sertation may exert a powerful negative influence on the graduate experience when it has not been accepted by the student as a reasonable and desirable task.

One problem touches everyone in graduate education, faculty and students alike—the hard constraints of time. Students want to finish their degree programs in a reasonable period of time. The disposition or circum- stances of some, however, may define reasonable time as “the shortest pos- sible time.” Others find the thought of any extension beyond the standard number of semesters a serious threat to their sense of adequacy. For students such as these, a thesis or dissertation is a risky venture.

Relatively few research studies finish on schedule, and time requirements invariably are underestimated. Frequent setbacks are almost inevitable. This is one aspect of the research process that is learned during the research

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experience: Haste in research is lethal to both quality of the product and worth of the experience. If you cannot spend the time, deciding to initiate a research project endangers the area of inquiry, your advisor, your institution, your edu- cation, your reputation, and any satisfaction you might take in completing the task. In short, if you can’t afford the time, then don’t do it at all.

Choosing Your Turf: Advisors and Areas

Once a firm decision has been made to write a thesis or dissertation, the choice of an advisor presents a less difficult problem. Here, area of interest dictates selection because it is essential to have an advisor who is knowl- edgeable. Further, it always is preferable to have one who is actively pub- lishing in the domain of interest.

Competent advisement is so important that a degree of student flexibility may be required. It is far better for students to adjust their long-range goals than to attempt research on a topic with which their advisor is completely unfamiliar. It may be necessary for the thesis or dissertation to be part of the advisor’s own research program. As long as the topic remains within the broad areas of student interest, however, it is possible to gain vital experi- ence in formulating questions, designing studies, and applying the technol- ogy and methods of inquiry that are generic to the domain.

It is desirable for student and advisor to interact throughout the develop- ment of the proposal, beginning with the initial selection and formulation of the question. On occasion, however, the student may bring an early stage proposal to a prospective advisor as a test of his or her interest or to encour- age acceptance of formal appointment as advisor. Experience suggests that this strategy is most likely to produce immediate results if the proposal is in the primary interest area of the advisor. If the proposal involves replication of some aspect of the advisor’s previous research, the student may be amazed at the intensity of attention this attracts.

Finding Your Question: What Don’t We Know That Matters?

Before launching into the process of identifying a suitable topic for inquiry, we suggest a short course of semantic and conceptual hygiene. The purpose of this small therapy is to establish a simple and reliable set of terms for think- ing through what can sometimes be a difficult and lengthy problem—what do I study?

All research emerges from a perceived problem, some unsatisfactory situ- ation in the world that we want to confront. Sometimes the difficulty rests

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simply in the fact that we don’t understand how things work and have the human itch to know. At other times, we are confronted by decisions or the need for action when the alternatives or consequences are unclear. Such per- ceived problems are experienced as a disequilibrium, a dissonance in our cog- nition. Notice, however, they do not exist out in the world, but in our minds.

That may sound at first like one of those “nice points” of which acade- mics are sometimes fond, but for the purposes of a novice researcher, locat- ing the problem in the right place and setting up your understanding of exactly what is unsatisfactory may represent much more than an arbitrary exercise. Thinking clearly about problems, questions, hypotheses, and research purposes can prevent mental logjams that sometimes block or delay clear identification of what is to be investigated.

The novice will encounter research reports, proposals, and even some well- regarded textbooks that freely interchange the words “problem” and “ques- tion” in ways that create all sorts of logical confusion (as in “The question in this study is to investigate the problem of . . .” or “The problem in this study is to investigate the question of . . .”). The problem is located alternately in the world or in the study, the distinction between problems and questions is unclear, and what is unsatisfactory in the situation is not set up as a clear tar- get for inquiry.

We suggest that you be more careful as you think through the question of what to study. Define your terms from the start and stick with them, at least until they prove not to be helpful. The definitions we prefer are arbitrary, but it has been our experience that making such distinctions is a useful habit of mind. Accordingly, we suggest that you use the following lexicon as you think and begin to write about your problem.

Problem—the experience we have when an unsatisfactory situation is encoun- tered. Once carefully defined, it is that situation, with all the attendant questions it may raise, that can become the target for a proposed study. Your proposal, then, will not lay out a plan to study the problem but will address one or several of the questions that explicate what you have found “problematic” about the sit- uation. Note that in this context neither situation nor problem is limited to a pragmatic definition. The observation that two theories contradict each other can be experienced as a problem, and a research question may be posed to address the conflict.

Question—a statement of what you wish to know about some unsatisfactory sit- uation, as in the following: What is the relation between . . . ? Which is the quickest way to . . . ? What would happen if . . . ? What is the location of . . . ? “What is the perspective of . . . ? As explained below, when cast in a precise, answerable form, one or several of these questions will become the mainspring for your study—the formal research question.

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Purpose—the explicit intention of the investigator to accumulate data in such a way as to answer the research question posed as the focus for the study. The word “objective” is a reasonable synonym here. Although only people can have intentions, it is common to invest our research design with purpose (as in “The purpose of this study is to determine the mechanism through which . . . ”).

Hypothesis—an affirmation about the nature of some situation in the world. A tentative proposition set up as a convenient target for an investigation, a state- ment to be confirmed or denied in terms of the evidence.

Given this lexicon, the search for a topic becomes the quest for a situation that is sufficiently unsatisfactory to be experienced as a problem. The pro- posal has as its purpose the setting up of a research question and the estab- lishment of exactly how (and why) the investigator intends to find the answer, thereby eliminating or reducing the experience of finding something problematic about the world. Problems lead to questions, which in turn lead to the purpose of the study and, in some instances, to hypotheses. Table 3.1 shows the question, purpose, and hypotheses for a study. Note that the hypotheses meet the criteria established in Chapter 1 and are the most specific.

The research process, and thus the proposal, begins with a question. Committed to performing a study within a given area of inquiry and allied with an appropriate advisor, students must identify a question that matches their interests as well as the resources and constraints of their situation. Given a theoretically infinite set of possible problems that might be researched, it is no small wonder that many students at first are overwhelmed and frozen into indecision. The “I can’t find a problem” syndrome is a common malady among graduate students, but fortunately one that can be cured by time and knowledge.

Research questions emerge from three broad sources: logic, practicality, and accident. In some cases, the investigator’s curiosity is directed to a gap in the logical structure of what already is known in the area. In other cases, the investigator responds to the demand for information about the applica- tion of knowledge to some practical service. In yet other cases, serendipity operates and the investigator is stimulated by an unexpected observation, often in the context of another study. It is common for several of these fac- tors to operate simultaneously to direct attention to a particular question. Personal circumstance and individual style also tend to dictate the most common source of questions for each researcher. Finally, all the sources depend on a more fundamental and prior factor—thorough knowledge of the area.

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It is this latter factor that accounts for the “graduate student syndrome.” Only as one grasps the general framework and the specific details of a particular area can unknowns be revealed, fortuitous observations raise ques- tions, and possible applications of knowledge become apparent. Traditional library study is the first step toward the maturity that permits confident selec- tion of a research question. Such study, however, is necessary but not suffi- cient. In any active area of inquiry, the current knowledge base is not in the library—it is in the invisible college of informal associations among research workers.

The working knowledge base of an area takes the form of unpublished papers, conference speeches, seminar transcripts, memoranda, dissertations in progress, grant applications, personal correspondence, telephone calls,

Developing the Thesis or Dissertation Proposal—47

Problem—Extensive teacher planning of lessons requires large investments of time and energy, and often must compete with other important responsibilities—both professional and personal.

Question—Is the amount or kind of lesson planning done by teachers positively related to student in-class learning behaviors such as time-on-task?

Purpose—The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between several categories (types) of teacher lesson planning and student time-on-task in a high school automobile mechanics class.

Hypotheses (Note that directional hypotheses are used for Hypotheses 1-3 and that even Hypothesis 4, stated in the null form, could be based on data from a pilot study.)

1. The number of teacher lesson planning decisions that relate to design and use of active learning strategies will be positively related to student time-on-task when those lessons are implemented.

2. The number of class management planning decisions related to particular lesson components will be positively related to student time-on-task when those components are implemented.

3. Teacher lesson planning decisions that require students to wait for the availability of tools or work sites will be negatively related to student time-on-task when those lessons are implemented.

4. The total number of teacher planning decisions (irrespective of category) will not be related to student time-on-task when those lessons are implemented.

Table 3.1 Problem, Question, Purpose, and Hypotheses

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and electronic mail communications, as well as conversations in the corri- dors of conference centers, restaurants, hotel rooms, and bars. To obtain access to this ephemeral resource, the student must be where the action is.

The best introduction to the current status of a research area is close asso- ciation with advisors who know the territory and are busy formulating and pursuing their own questions. Conversing with peers, listening to professor- ial discussions, assisting in research projects, attending lectures and con- ferences, exchanging papers, and corresponding with faculty or students at other institutions are all ways of capturing the elusive state of the art. In all of these, however, the benefits derived often depend on knowing enough about the area to join the dialogue by asking questions, offering a tangible point for discussion, or raising a point of criticism. In research, as elsewhere, the more you know, the more you can learn.

Although establishing a network of exchange may seem impossible to young students who view themselves as novices and outsiders, it is a happy fact that new recruits generally find a warm welcome within any well-defined area of intensive study. Everyone depends on informal relationships among research colleagues, and this rapport is one source of sustaining excitement and pleasure in the research enterprise. As soon as you can articulate well- formulated ideas about possible problems, your colleagues will be eager to provide comment, critical questions, suggestions, and encouragement.

In the final process of selecting the thesis or dissertation problem, there is one exercise that can serve to clarify the relative significance of competing questions. Most questions can be placed within a general model that displays a sequence of related questions—often in an order determined by logic or practical considerations. Smaller questions are seen to lead to larger and more general questions, methodological questions are seen necessarily to precede substantive questions, and theoretical questions may be found inter- spersed among purely empirical questions. The following is a much simpli- fied but entirely realistic example of such a sequential model. It begins with an everyday observation and leads through a series of specific and interre- lated problems to a high-order question of great significance.

OBSERVATION: Older adults generally take longer than young adults to com- plete cognitive tasks, but those who are physically active seem to be quicker mentally, especially in tasks that demand behavioral speed.

1. What types of cognitive function might be related to exercise?

2. How can these cognitive functions be measured?

3. What are the effects of habitual exercise on one of these types of cog- nitive function—reaction time?

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4. Are active older adults faster on a simple reaction time task than seden- tary older adults?

5. Are active older adults faster on a more complex reaction time task, such as choice reaction time, than older sedentary adults?

QUESTION: What effect does habitual exercise have on choice reaction time in older adults?

By making the twists and turns of speculation visible in the concrete process of sequential listing, previously unnoticed possibilities may be revealed or tentative impressions confirmed. In the simple example given above, the reader may immediately see other questions that could have been inserted or alternative chains of inquiry that branch off from the main track of logic. Other diagrammatic lists of questions about exercise and cognitive function might be constructed from different but related starting points. One might begin, for example, with the well-established observation that circulation is superior in older individuals who exercise regularly. This might lead through a series of proximal experiments toward the ultimate question, “What is the mechanism by which exercise maintains cognitive function?”

Building such diagrams will be useful for the student in several other ways. It is a way of controlling the instinct to grab the first researchable question that becomes apparent in an area. Often such questions are inferior to what might be selected after more careful contemplation of the alterna- tives. A logical sequence can be followed for most questions, beginning with “What has to be asked first?” Once these serial relationships become clear, it is easier to assign priorities.

In addition to identifying the correct ordering and relative importance of questions, such conceptual models also encourage students to think in terms of a series of studies that build cumulatively toward more significant con- clusions than can be achieved in a one-shot thesis or dissertation. The fac- ulty member who has clear dedication to a personal research program can be a key factor in attracting students into the long-term commitments that give life to an area of inquiry.

Researchable questions occur daily to the active researcher. The problem is not finding them but maintaining some sense of whether, and where, they might fit into an overall plan. Although this condition may seem remote to the novice struggling to define a first research topic, formulating even a modest research agenda can be a helpful process. The guidance of a sequen- tial display of questions can allow the student to settle confidently on the tar- get for a proposal.

Developing the Thesis or Dissertation Proposal—49

Lexeme formation: the familiar 39

3. Some speakers will fi nd the forms in (3b) odd, and will question their acceptability, but they are all attested

in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and discussed in Bauer, Lieber, and Plag ( 2013 ).

goes on. This morpheme (an a for the verb ‘love’ and an i for the verb ‘say’)

doesn’t mean anything, but still must be added before the inflectional

ending can be attached. The root plus this extra morpheme is the stem .

Thought of another way, the stem is usually the base that is left when the

inflectional endings are removed. We will look further at roots and stems

in Chapter 6 , when we discuss inflection more fully.

3.3 Affixation

3.3.1 Word formation rules Let’s look more carefully at words derived by affixation . Prefixes and suf-

fixes usually have special requirements for the sorts of bases they can

attach to. Some of these requirements concern the phonology (sounds) of

their bases, and others concern the semantics (meaning) of their bases –

we will return to these shortly – but the most basic requirements are often

the syntactic part of speech or category of their bases. For example, the

suffix -ness attaches freely to adjectives, as the examples in (3a) show and

sometimes to nouns (as in (3b) ), but not to verbs (3c) :

(3) a. – ness on adjectives: redness, happiness, wholeness, commonness,

niceness

b. – ness on nouns: appleness, babeness, couch-potatoness 3

c. – ness on verbs: *runness, *wiggleness, *yawnness

The prefix un- attaches to adjectives (where it means ‘not’) and to verbs

(where it means ‘reverse action’), but not to nouns:

(4) a. un – on adjectives: unhappy, uncommon, unkind, unserious

b. un- on verbs: untie, untwist, undress, unsnap

c. un- on nouns: *unchair, *unidea, *ungiraffe

We might begin to build some of the rules that native speakers of English use

for making words with -ness or un- by stating their categorial requirements:

(5) Rule for -ness (first version): Attach – ness to an adjective or to a noun.

Rule for un- (first version): Attach un- to an adjective or to a verb.

Of course, if we want to be as precise as possible about what native speak-

ers know about forming words with these affixes, we should also indicate

what category of word results from using these affixes, and what the

resulting word means. So a more complete version of our – ness and un-

rules might look like (6) :

(6) Rule for – ness (second version): – ness attaches to adjectives or nouns

‘X’ and produces nouns meaning ‘the quality of X’.

Rule for un- (second version): un- attaches to adjectives meaning ‘X’

and produces adjectives meaning ‘not X’; un – attaches to verbs

meaning ‘X’ and produces verbs meaning ‘reverse the action X’.

40 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY

If we’re really trying to model what native speakers of English know about

these affixes, we might try to be even more precise. For example, un- does

not attach to all adjectives or verbs, as you can discover by looking at the

next Challenge box.

Challenge

Look at the following words and try to work out more details of the

rule for un- in English. The (a) list contains some adjectives to which

negative un- can be attached and others which seem impossible or at

least somewhat odd. The (b) list contains some verbs to which

reversative un- can attach and others which seem impossible. See if

you can discern some patterns:

(a) unhappy, *unsad, unlovely, *unugly, unintelligent, *unstupid

(b) untie, unwind, unhinge, unknot, *undance, *unyawn, *unexplode,

*unpush

What the (a) examples in the Challenge box seem to show is that the negative

prefix un- in English prefers to attach to bases that do not themselves have

negative connotations. This is not true all of the time – adjectives like unself-

ish or unhostile are attested in English – but it’s at least a significant tendency.

As for the (b) examples, they suggest that the un- that attaches to verbs pre-

fers verbal bases that imply some sort of result, and moreover that the result

is not permanent. Verbs like dance, push, and yawn denote actions that have

no results, and although explode implies a result (i.e., something is blown up),

it’s a result that is permanent. In contrast, a verb like tie implies a result

(something is in a bow or knot) which is temporary (you can take it apart).

We have just constructed what morphologists call a word formation

rule , a rule which makes explicit all the categorial, semantic, and phono-

logical information that native speakers know about the kind of base that

an affix attaches to and about the kind of word it creates. We might now

state the full word formation rules for negative un- as in (7) :

(7) Rule for negative un- (final version): un- attaches to adjectives,

preferably those with neutral or positive connotations, and creates

negative adjectives. It has no phonological restrictions.

Now let’s look at two more affixes. In English we can form new verbs by

using the suffixes -ize or -ify . Both of these suffixes attach to either nouns

or adjectives, resulting in verbs:

(8) -ize on adjectives: civilize, idealize, finalize, romanticize,

tranquillize

-ize on nouns: unionize, crystallize, hospitalize, caramelize,

animalize

-ify on adjectives: purify, glorify, uglify, moistify, diversify

– ify on nouns: mummify, speechify, classify, brutify, scarify,

bourgeoisify

Lexeme formation: the familiar 41

We might state the word formation rules for -ize and -ify as in (9) :

(9) Rule for -ize (first version): -ize attaches to adjectives or nouns that

mean ‘X’ and produces verbs that mean ‘make/put into X’.

Rule for -ify (first version): -ify attaches to adjectives or nouns that

mean ‘X’ and produces verbs that mean ‘make/put into X’.

But again, we can be a bit more precise about these rules. Although -ize

and -ify have almost identical requirements for the category of base they

attach to and produce words with roughly the same meaning, they have

somewhat different requirements on the phonological form of the stem

they attach to. As the examples in (8) show, -ize prefers words with two or

more syllables where the final syllable doesn’t bear primary stress (e.g.,

trá nquil, hó spital ). The suffix -ify , on the other hand, prefers monosyllabic

bases ( pure, brute, scar ), although it also attaches to bases that end in a – y

( mummy, ugly ) or bases whose final syllables are stressed ( divé rse, bourgé ois ).

Since we want to be as precise as possible about our word formation rules

for these suffixes, we will state their phonological restrictions along with

their categorial needs:

(10) Rule for -ize (final version): -ize attaches to adjectives or nouns of

two or more syllables where the final syllable does not bear

primary stress. For a base ‘X’ it produces verbs that mean ‘make/put

into X’.

I leave it to you to come up with the final version of the word formation

rule for – ify.

3.3.2 Word structure When you divide up a complex word into its morphemes, as in (11) , it’s

easy to get the impression that words are put together like the beads that

make up a necklace – one after the other in a line:

(11) unhappiness = un + happy + ness

But morphologists believe that words are more like onions than like neck-

laces: onions are made up of layers from innermost to outermost. Consider

a word like unhappiness . We can break this down into its component mor-

phemes un + happy + ness , but given what we learned above about the

properties of the prefix un- and the suffix – ness we know something more

about the way in which this word is constructed beyond just its constitu-

ent parts. We know that un- must first go on the base happy . Happy is an

adjective, and un- attaches to adjectives but does not change their catego-

ry. The suffix -ness attaches only to adjectives and makes them into nouns.

So if un- attaches first to happy and -ness attaches next, the requirements

of both affixes are met. But if we were to do it the other way around, -ness

would have first created a noun, and then un- would be unable to attach.

We could represent the order of attachment as if words really were

onions, with the base in the innermost layer, and each affix in its own

succeeding layer: see Figure 3.2 .

42 INTRODUCING MORPHOLOGY

But linguists, not generally being particularly artistic, prefer to show

these relationships as ‘trees’ that look like this :

(12)

N

A

A

un happy ness

Similarly, we might represent the structure of a word like repurify as in (13) :

(13)

V

V

A

re pure ify

In order to draw this structure, we must first know that the prefix re-

attaches to verbs (e.g., reheat, rewash , or redo ) but not to adjectives ( *repure,

*rehappy ) or to nouns ( *rechair, *retruth ). Once we know this, we can say that

the adjective pure must first be made into a verb by suffixing -ify , and only

then can re- attach to it.

FIGURE 3.2 Words are like onions

Challenge

In English, the suffix -ize attaches to nouns or adjectives to form

verbs. The suffix -ation attaches to verbs to form nouns. And the suffix

-al attaches to nouns to form adjectives. Interestingly, these suffixes

Lexeme formation: the familiar 43

3.3.3 What do affixes mean? When we made the distinction between affixes and bound bases above, we

did so on the basis of a rather vague notion of semantic robustness; bound

bases in some sense had more meat to them than affixes did. Let us now

attempt to make that idea a bit more precise by looking at typical mean-

ings of affixes.

In some cases, affixes seem to have not much meaning at all. Consider

the suffixes in (14) :

(14) a. -(a)tion examination, taxation, realization, construction

– ment agreement, placement, advancement, postponement

-al refusal, arousal, disposal

b. -ity purity, density, diversity, complexity

-ness happiness, thickness, rudeness, sadness

Beyond turning verbs into nouns with meanings like ‘process of X-ing’ or

‘result of X-ing’, where X is the meaning of the verb, it’s not clear that the

suffixes -(a)tion, -ment , and -al add much of any meaning at all. Similarly

with -ity and -ness , these don’t carry much semantic weight of their own,

aside from what comes with turning adjectives into nouns that mean

something like ‘the abstract quality of X’, where X is the base adjective.

Affixes like these are sometimes called transpositional affixes , meaning

that their primary function is to change the category of their base with-

out adding any extra meaning.

Contrast these, however, with affixes like those in (15) :

(15) a. -ee employee, recruitee, deportee, inductee

b. -less shoeless, treeless, rainless, supperless

c. re- reheat, reread, rewash

These affixes seem to have more semantic meat on their bones, so to

speak: -ee on a verb indicates a person who undergoes an action; -less

means something like ‘without’; and re- means something like ‘again’.

Languages frequently have affixes (or other morphological processes, as

we’ll see in Chapter 5 ) that fall into common semantic categories. Among

those categories are:

• personal or participant affixes: These are affixes that create ‘people nouns’ either from verbs or from nouns. Among the personal affixes

in English are the suffix -er which forms agent nouns (the ‘doer’ of

can be attached in a recursive fashion: convene → convention →

conventional → conventionalize → conventionalization .

First draw a word tree for conventionalization . Then see if you can

find other bases on which you can attach these suffixes recursively.

What is the most complex word you can create from a single base

that still makes sense to you? Are there any limits to the complexity

of words derived in this way?

Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language

Guides to Research Methods in Language and Linguistics

Series Editor: Li Wei, Centre for Applied Linguistics, University College London

The science of language encompasses a truly interdisciplinary field of research, with a wide range of focuses, approaches, and objectives. While linguistics has its own traditional approaches, a variety of other intellectual disciplines have contributed methodological perspectives that enrich the field as a whole. As a result, linguistics now draws on state‐of‐the‐art work from such fields as psychology, computer science, biology, neuroscience and cognitive science, sociology, music, philosophy, and anthropology.

The interdisciplinary nature of the field presents both challenges and opportu- nities to students who must understand a variety of evolving research skills and methods. The Guides to Research Methods in Language and Linguistics addresses these skills in a systematic way for advanced students and beginning researchers in language science. The books in this series focus especially on the relationships between theory, methods, and data—the understanding of which is fundamental to the successful completion of research projects and the advancement of knowledge.

1. The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and Multilingualism Edited by Li Wei and Melissa G. Moyer

2. Research Methods in Child Language: A Practical Guide Edited by Erika Hoff

3. Research Methods in Second Language Acquisition: A Practical Guide Edited by Susan M. Gass and Alison Mackey

4. Research Methods in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics: A Practical Guide Edited by Nicole Müller and Martin J. Ball

5. Research Methods in Sociolinguistics: A Practical Guide Edited by Janet Holmes and Kirk Hazen

6. Research Methods in Sign Language Studies: A Practical Guide Edited by Eleni Orfanidou, Bencie Woll, and Gary Morgan

7. Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide Edited by Francis Hult and David Cassels Johnson

8. Research Methods in Intercultural Communication: A Practical Guide Edited by Zhu Hua

9. Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language: A Practical Guide Edited by Annette M. B. de Groot and Peter Hagoort

Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language

A Practical Guide

Edited by

Annette M. B. de Groot and Peter Hagoort

This edition first published 2018 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Contents

List of Figures vii List of Tables ix Notes on Contributors x Preface xvi

1 Habituation Techniques 1 Christopher T. Fennell

2 Visual Preference Techniques 18 Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Melanie Soderstrom, Dilara Deniz Can, and Kathy Hirsh‐Pasek

3 Assessing Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary in Child Language 40 Virginia A. Marchman and Philip S. Dale

4 Eye‐Movement Tracking During Reading 68 Reinhold Kliegl and Jochen Laubrock

5 The Visual World Paradigm 89 Anne Pier Salverda and Michael K. Tanenhaus

6 Word Priming and Interference Paradigms 111 Zeshu Shao and Antje S. Meyer

7 Structural Priming 130 Holly P. Branigan and Catriona L. Gibb

8 Conversation Analysis 151 Elliott M. Hoey and Kobin H. Kendrick

9 Virtual Reality 174 Daniel Casasanto and Kyle M. Jasmin

10 Studying Psycholinguistics out of the Lab 190 Laura J. Speed, Ewelina Wnuk, and Asifa Majid

11 Computational Modeling 208 Ping Li and Xiaowei Zhao

vi Contents

12 Corpus Linguistics 230 Marc Brysbaert, Paweł Mandera, and Emmanuel Keuleers

13 Electrophysiological Methods 247 Joost Rommers and Kara D. Federmeier

14 Hemodynamic Methods: fMRI and fNIRS 266 Roel M. Willems and Alejandrina Cristia

15 Structural Neuroimaging 288 Stephanie J. Forkel and Marco Catani

16 Lesion Studies 310 Juliana V. Baldo and Nina F. Dronkers

17 Molecular Genetic Methods 330 Carolien G. F. de Kovel and Simon E. Fisher

Index 354

List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Examples of various infant language habituation tasks 5 Figure 1.2 Mean looking times across various trial types in Fennell

and Byers‐Heinlein (2014) 12 Figure 2.1 The Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm 22 Figure 2.2 Means of single longest look in seconds to infant‐directed (IDS)

and adult‐directed (ADS) speech stimuli 25 Figure 2.3 The Interactive Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm 26 Figure 2.4 Visual fixation to original label, new label, and recovery trials

by condition 28 Figure 2.5 Eye gaze shifts toward and away from target in

looking‐while‐listening task by age 30 Figure 2.6 The Headturn Preference Procedure 33 Figure 4.1 Typical eye tracker set up 71 Figure 4.2 Illustration of the gaze‐contingent moving‐window (top) and

boundary (bottom) paradigms 73 Figure 4.3 Velocity‐based saccade detection 75 Figure 4.4 Determination of word boundaries with PRAAT software 80 Figure 4.5 Main effect of eye‐voice span and its interaction with predictability 81 Figure 5.1 Example of a screen‐based visual world paradigm experimental

set up 90 Figure 5.2 Example visual display modeled after Altmann and Kamide (1999) 91 Figure 5.3 Timing of target fixations for each trial, for one participant

and fixation proportions computed for same data 100 Figure 5.4 Proportion of fixations over time (from target‐word onset) to

target (goat), cohort competitor (goal), and distractor in neutral and constraining verb conditions in Experiment 1 in Dahan and Tanenhaus (2004) 104

Figure 6.1 An illustration of the trial structure in Meyer and Schvaneveldt (1971) 113 Figure 6.2 An illustration of the prime‐target pairs used in Glaser

and Düngelhoff (1984) 114 Figure 6.3 Results obtained by Glaser and Düngelhoff (1984) 115 Figure 6.4 Illustration of trial structures in the masked and unmasked

conditions in de Wit and Kinoshita (2015) 119

viii List of Figures

Figure 7.1 Example trial in a picture‐matching comprehension priming paradigm 138

Figure 7.2 Example trial in a picture‐matching and picture‐description production priming paradigm 140

Figure 7.3 Example trial in a sentence recall production priming paradigm 142 Figure 10.1 Comparison of cut and break verbs in Chontal, Hindi,

and Jalonke 195 Figure 11.1 The basic architecture of a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) 213 Figure 11.2 A sketch of the probabilistic model that incorporates

distributional statistics from cross‐situational observation and prosodic and attentional highlights from social gating 219

Figure 11.3 A sketch of the DevLex‐II model 221 Figure 11.4 Vocabulary spurt simulated by DevLex‐II (591 target words) 223 Figure 13.1 Idealized example of an event‐related potential waveform

in response to a visual stimulus, with labeled positive and negative peaks 248

Figure 13.2 Grand average ERPs from three parietal channels, elicited by the final words in the three conditions 257

Figure 13.3 Simulated EEG data illustrating the difference between ERPs and time‐frequency analyses in their sensitivity to phase‐locked (evoked) and non‐phase‐locked (induced) activity 260

Figure 14.1 An anatomical scan of the head and the brain (A), and Functional MRI images (B) 269

Figure 14.2 Example of an idealized BOLD curve, sometimes called the hemodynamic response function (HRF) 271

Figure 14.3 A statistical map overlaid on an anatomical brain scan 276 Figure 14.4 Image of a 5‐month‐old infant wearing a fNIRS cap, including

a schematic illustration of the path of light between a source (star) and a detector (circle), through the scalp (dashed line) and cortical tissue (in gray) 278

Figure 14.5 Sample of signal in fNIRS studies 280 Figure 15.1 Imaging of an acute patient presenting with anomia

following left inferior parietal and frontal lobe stroke 293 Figure 15.2 Lesion mapping based on T1‐weighted data (A), on a diffusion

tractography atlas (B), and an example of extracting tract‐based measurements from tractography (C) 299

Figure 15.3 Anatomical variability in perisylvian white matter anatomy and its relation to post‐stroke language recovery 302

Figure 16.1 A schematic illustration showing the steps involved in a VLSM analysis 317

Figure 16.2 Overlay of patients’ lesions 320 Figure 16.3 Power analysis map showing the degree of power in our sample,

given a medium effect size and alpha set at p < .05 321 Figure 16.4 VLSM results showing neural correlates of auditory

word recognition with varying levels of correction 322 Figure 17.1 Transmission of DNA between generations 332 Figure 17.2 Visualization of Sanger sequencing results 338 Figure 17.3 Next generation sequencing 339 Figure 17.4 Visualization of SNP‐chip results 340

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Mock habituation data from four experiments with looking time as the dependent variable 8

Table 1.2 Steps in data collection and analyses 9 Table 2.1 Visual and linguistic stimuli used to teach two novel

words in either infant‐directed or adult‐directed speech 24 Table 2.2 Ten- to 12‐month‐old infants saw two types of discrimination

trials, one to test for path discrimination and one for actor discrimination 31

Table 3.1 Overview of instruments/analysis tools for studying vocabulary development in children 45

Table 3.2 Example transcript from CHILDES 48 Table 4.1 Definitions of location and duration eye‐tracking measures 77 Table 4.2 Practical issues related to eye‐tracking during reading 82 Table 7.1 Example structural alternations studied in structural priming

experiments 134 Table 7.2 Stimulus materials for a hypothetical small clause study 144 Table 7.3 Hypothetical results for a small clause study 145 Table 8.1 Questions and assessments from Extracts 8.1 to 8.3 161 Table 12.1 Excerpt from the SUBTLEX‐US database for the word “appalled” 234 Table 12.2 Stimuli used in a semantic priming experiment by de Mornay

Davies (1998) 239 Table 17.1 Example of genotyping chip results for four individuals

and five polymorphisms 340

Notes on Contributors

Juliana V. Baldo is Research Scientist at Veterans Affairs Northern California Health Care System and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at California State University East Bay. She specializes in research related to language and neuropsychological disorders arising from brain injury, including both stroke and traumatic brain injury. Dr. Baldo has also published a number of articles on language impairments in aphasia and associated cognitive deficits, and has utilized various brain imaging methodologies to better understand the neural basis of these impairments.

Holly P. Branigan is Professor of Psychology of Language and Cognition at the University of Edinburgh. Her research uses a wide range of experimental psycholin- guistic methods to investigate language production in monologue and dialogue, with a particular focus on syntactic processing and representation in adults and in typically and atypically developing children.

Marc Brysbaert is Professor of Psychology at Ghent University. In recent years his word recognition research has shifted to big data, including the calculation and validation of improved word frequency measures, running megastudies to establish word processing times, collecting subjective measures of word features (concreteness, valence, arousal, age‐of‐acquisition), and investigating the use and validation of semantic vectors.

Daniel Casasanto is Associate Professor of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He studies how physical and social experiences shape our brains and minds.

Marco Catani holds a joint affiliation as clinical senior lecturer and honorary consultant psychiatrist with the Department of Forensics and Neurodevelopmental Sciences and the Department Neuroimaging at King’s College London. He studies the lateralization of human brain networks and their implications for post stroke recovery from aphasia and neglect.

Alejandrina Cristia is a researcher at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, affiliated with the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique

Notes on Contributors xi

(ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University. She studies early language acquisition.

Philip S. Dale is Professor Emeritus of Speech & Hearing Sciences at the University of New Mexico and Visiting Professor at King’s College London. He is a co‐developer of the MacArthur‐Bates Communicative Development Inventories. He has conducted research on the assessment, genetic and environmental causes, and consequences of individual differences in early language development, with a special interest in late talkers. He also conducted research on the effectiveness of intervention programs for young children.

Annette M. B. de Groot is Professor of Psycholinguistics at the University of Amsterdam. Her early research focused on priming effects on word recognition, the structure of the mental lexicon, and the psychology of reading and spelling. Later her research shifted toward bilingualism and multilingualism, studying bilingual word recognition and word production, foreign‐language vocabulary acquisition, translation and simultaneous interpreting, and the influence of bilingualism on various aspects of verbal and non‐verbal cognition.

Carolien G. F. de Kovel is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She studies the genetic background of lateralization in humans. Carolien received her PhD in Biology at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Dilara Deniz Can is a scientist/practitioner who has obtained her PhD and Educational Specialist degrees from the University of Delaware in School Psychology. She completed a post‐doctoral research fellowship at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences working with vulnerable children ages 3 to 5, studying the links between brain, environment, and language development. She has worked as a school psychologist in public schools of WA State, completing psycho‐educational evaluations for young children and adolescents.

Nina F. Dronkers is a VA Research Career Scientist and Director of the Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders with the Department of Veterans Affairs Northern California Health Care System. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Neurology. She received her interdisciplinary Ph.D. degree in Neuropsychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and has since used novel techniques to identify new brain structures that play critical roles in the processing of speech and language, and studies how these relate to other cognitive skills.

Kara D. Federmeier is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, the Program in Neuroscience, and the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois. Her research uses event‐related potentials, EEG, and eye tracking to understand the mechanisms involved in language comprehension and meaning processing, the nature of hemispheric differences in cognitive processing,

xii Notes on Contributors

the impact of age‐related changes on language and memory functioning, and the effects of literacy on cognitive processing in adulthood.

Christopher T. Fennell is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Language Development Lab. His research focuses on speech perception, phonological development, and lexical acquisition in monolingual and bilingual infants. He has published numerous articles on infant language development, many using habit- uation methods, in journals such as Child Development, Developmental Science, Infancy, and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

Simon E. Fisher is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Professor of Language and Genetics at the Donders Institute, Radboud University, in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He obtained a Natural Sciences degree from Cambridge University, UK, followed by a DPhil in Human Genetics at Oxford University, UK. His research uses genes as molecular windows into the basis of human cognitive traits, with a particular focus on speech, language, and reading skills.

Stephanie J. Forkel is senior neuroimaging research scientist in the Department for Neuroimaging at King’s College London. She investigates the lateralization of human brain networks and their implications for post stroke recovery from aphasia and neglect.

Catriona L. Gibb was a PhD student in the Psychology Department at the University of Edinburgh. Her research used experimental methods to study the psycholinguis- tics of bilingualism, most recently focusing on the nature of syntactic processing and syntactic representation in early and late bilinguals.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff is Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Professor at the University of Delaware. She has received numerous awards for her research and her dissemina- tion work. Funded by federal agencies, she has over 150 publications, as well as 16 books and monographs. Passionate about the dissemination of psychological science for improving our schools and families’ lives, her latest book is Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children (APA Press).

Peter Hagoort is Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University. He is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour. His research focuses on the neurobiolog- ical infrastructure for language with the help of advanced neuroimaging methods such as fMRI, MEG, and TMS.

Kathy Hirsh‐Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Temple University and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Author of 14 books and hundreds of publications, she is the recipient of numerous awards, is President of the International Society for Infant Studies, and served as an Associate Editor of Child Development. An expert in early learning (language, literacy, STEM), she is dedicated to translating basic science for public consumption.

Notes on Contributors xiii

Elliott M. Hoey is a PhD student in the Language and Cognition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He uses conversation analytic and interactional linguistic methods to study the multimodal constitution of mundane social settings. His recent research has addressed the inter- actional uses of sighing and drinking, and participants’ conduct during extended silences in conversation.

Kyle M. Jasmin is a postdoctoral researcher at University College London. He studies the cognitive neuroscience of language and communication, in typical and atypical populations.

Kobin H. Kendrick is a Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. His research uses conversation analysis to investigate basic organizations of talk‐in‐interaction such as turn‐taking, action‐sequencing, and repair. A recent line of research has examined the multimodal practices that participants in interaction use to “recruit” others to assist them with troubles that emerge in everyday activities.

Emmanuel Keuleers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Information Sciences at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He has done extensive research on visual word recognition and computational modeling of morphology. In his current research he is particularly interested in effects of age and multilingualism on vocabulary growth and in the application and interpretation of crowd‐based lexical measures to language processing.

Reinhold Kliegl is Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Germany. His research focuses on how the dynamics of language‐related, perceptual, and oculomotor processes subserve attentional control, using reading as one experimental venue. He also specializes in applied multivariate statistics, espe- cially linear mixed models. He is an active promoter of Open Science with the Potsdam Mind Research Repository (PMR2); (http://read.psych.uni‐potsdam.de/ pmr2/).

Jochen Laubrock is Senior Research Scientist, Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Germany. His research focuses on how perceptual, attentional, and (oculo‐)motor processes interact in the planning of goal‐related behavior. A special interest is in the co‐operation of foveal, parafoveal, and peripheral processing for the control of saccade timing and target selection in reading, related tasks (RAN), and scene perception, and how these processes operating at quite different time‐scales cooperate when reading graphic literature.

Ping Li is Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Information Sciences and Technology, Associate Director of the Institute for CyberScience, and Co‐Director of the Center for Brain, Behavior, and Cognition at Pennsylvania State University. He holds a Ph.D. (1990) in psycholinguistics from the University of Leiden. His research is focused on the neurocognitive and computational mechanisms of language acquisition and bilingualism.

xiv Notes on Contributors

Asifa Majid is Professor of Language, Communication, and Cultural Cognition at the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen and Affiliated Principle Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She investigates concepts in language and cognition by conducting cross‐cultural and developmental studies. At the heart of her research program lie the questions: Where do our categories come from, and how widely are they shared across languages and cultures?

Paweł Mandera is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University. In his research he brings together methods from com- puter science and psychology to study how text corpora and other sources of behavioral data can be used to advance our understanding of human language processing.

Virginia A. Marchman is a Research Associate in Psychology at Stanford University and Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the MacArthur‐Bates Communicative Development Inventories and a contributing member of Wordbank. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of individual differences in language processing efficiency and vocabulary development in monolingual and bilingual children.

Antje S. Meyer (PhD Radboud University) is a professor at Radboud University and director at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Before taking up her appointments in Nijmegen in 2010, she was a professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Birmingham, UK. Meyer has worked on various aspects of psycho- linguistics, in particular word and sentence production, dialogue, and the relationship between visual‐conceptual and linguistic processing.

Joost Rommers is a postdoctoral researcher in the Psychology Department and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois. His  research uses electrophysiological and eye‐tracking methods to investigate language comprehension and production. One focus concerns the mechanisms and consequences of predicting upcoming language input.

Anne Pier Salverda is a Research Associate in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. He did his graduate work at the Max‐Planck‐ Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. His research focuses on speech perception and spoken‐word recognition.

Zeshu Shao (PhD Radboud University) is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She has worked on speech production, specifically on the attention control mechanism influencing the planning and pro- duction of spoken words in a wide range of populations, and the effects of social network structure on lexical choice.

Notes on Contributors xv

Melanie Soderstrom is Associate Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Psychology at the University of Manitoba. She has published a number of studies using the Headturn Preference Procedure on infants’ sensitivity to the prosodic char- acteristics of speech and their understanding of grammatical dependencies. She is currently active in initiatives to automate analysis of large scale recordings of children’s real‐world language experiences.

Laura J. Speed is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She conducts psychological research on the interplay between language and the senses. Her PhD thesis investigated an embodied account of language comprehension: How perception and action systems contribute to the understanding of words and sentences. Her current work focuses on language and olfaction—how we talk about smell and understand language about smell, and how language and information from multiple perceptual modalities can influence odour cognition.

Michael K. Tanenhaus is the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester and a Chair Professor of Nanjing Normal University. His research with the Visual World Paradigm has spanned topics in spoken language processing ranging from speech perception to interactive conversation.

Roel M. Willems is Associate Professor at the Centre for Language Studies and Donders Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen. He studies the role of mental sim- ulation during narrative comprehension.

Ewelina Wnuk is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen. She conducts fieldwork‐based research among the speakers of Maniq—an Austroasiatic language spoken by a group of nomadic hunter‐gatherers in Thailand. Her research interests include semantics, grammar, the relationship between language and culture, and the language of perception. In her recent work, she has been focusing on the language of smell and its relationship to cognition.

Xiaowei Zhao is Associate Professor of Psychology at Emmanuel College, Boston. He holds a B.S. (1998) as well as a Ph.D. (2003) in physics from Nankai University in China. Dr. Zhao works in the field of computational modeling of language development, knowledge representation, and bilingualism. He is the President‐elect of the Society for Computers in Psychology (term 2016‐2017).

Preface

In many aspects the human language system is a unique support system for communication and thinking. Ways to investigate this complex cognitive capacity were traditionally restricted to observational and behavioral methods in healthy people and neuropsychological patients with a language disorder. In recent decades this picture has changed dramatically. Partly due to technological developments and partly as a result of developments in other fields of research, methods to study language and communication have seen a vast increase in number and level of sophistication. Due to the technological progress in computing power, we are now able to build way more advanced computational models of language processing than ever before. Thanks to developments in neuroimaging and genetic sequencing, we are able to study the neural basis and the genetic underpinnings of the language‐ ready brain in an unprecedented manner. These developments, however, come at a price. To be able to appreciate research findings or actively participate in this research field, one has to be acutely aware of the ins and outs of the research methods that are currently available. Until now a volume that summarizes and discusses all available methods in this field of research was missing. Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language intends to fill this gap. It provides a comprehensive overview of all relevant methods currently used in research on human language and communication. Some of them have their roots in psycholinguistics, others were introduced from other fields of science such as the biological sciences. Some require highly specialized technical knowledge and skills, whereas others take little time and effort to learn. For some methods a modest, inexpensive laboratory infrastructure suffices, whereas others depend on equipment that takes millions to acquire and interdisciplinary groups of specialists to operate. Some are offline methods that only measure the outcome of mental processing, whereas others continuously monitor mental processes as they unfold in real time, producing information‐rich and dense datasets. Presenting this diverse collection of methods, we anticipate that this book will be a useful guide for doctoral students, postdocs, and active researchers in our field who would want to inform themselves about the basics, the advantages and disadvantages of available research methods, and to get for each one of them pointers to additional method‐related information and best practice examples.

While conceiving this book we wondered how the great diversity of methods used in the study of language—its acquisition, use, neural and genetic basis, and disor- ders—could be covered within the limited space available. The solution was to not

Preface xvii

focus on the specific type of research methods called tasks, of which an innumerable variety exists, but on a broader notion of what research methods are. A task is what participants in an experiment are asked to do, for instance, to name the objects on a set of pictures shown to them. The participants’ behavioral and/or brain responses are registered and constitute the database from which the researcher subsequently extracts information. A research method in the more general sense that we had in mind for this volume is a much broader construct, one that covers a complex of procedures to study the question of interest (e.g., designing a study, constructing stimulus materials, and collecting and analysing the data), and that also includes the technical apparatus, tools, and instruments that support these procedures. Although many methods in this broad sense include data gathering by having participants per- form some task, other methods do without this altogether because the data already exist (corpus linguistics; Chapter  12) or because the method produces artificially generated data (computational modeling; Chapter 11). There are also methods that elicit data from participants without the latter explicitly being asked to perform some task (e.g., the habituation techniques and visual preference techniques presented in Chapters 1 and 2, respectively). Other methods can be combined with a multitude of different tasks (e.g., word priming and interference paradigms, Chapter 6; struc- tural priming, Chapter 7; the electrophysiological and hemodynamic neuroimaging methods presented in Chapters 13 and 14, respectively). All this shows that tasks and methods are not the same things.

A feature that characterizes many methods in the broad sense of the word is that they are domain‐nonspecific. Those developed within psycholinguistics can typically be used in various of its sub‐fields: They are suitable to address questions concerning more than one, or all three, of psycholinguistics’ main areas of study (language acqui- sition, comprehension, and production) and/or to answer questions about multiple linguistic domains (e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics). The neuro- biological methods included in this volume are even more multipurpose, not being restricted to studying language but domain‐general pur sang, also applicable in studying other areas of cognition and other aspects of human (and animal) behavior.

While the majority of the 17 contributions to this book present domain‐nonspecific methods, a couple of them deal with domain‐specific methods: Chapter 3 presents three approved methods for assessing vocabulary in children (language sampling, parent report, and direct assessment); Chapter 4 discusses the ins and outs of the presumably most ecologically valid behavioral research method for examining the reading process: the tracking of eye‐movements; Chapter 8 exclusively deals with conversation analysis. But even these domain‐specific methods allow variability in how they are used and are thus able to inform multiple aspects of language processing. For instance, having the participants read complete paragraphs is what qualifies eye‐movement tracking as an ecologically valid method to study reading, but the stimulus does not need to be a whole paragraph. Sentences, even single words, may also serve as stimuli and, when they do, inform accounts of syntactic parsing, semantic analysis, and word recognition. Similarly, though the primary goal of conversation analysis is to study human social interactions and how people perform actions through talking, the database on which the analyses are done, often a corpus of naturally occurring conversations, contains information on all aspects of the conversational partners’ language use and, thus, on phonology, vocabulary, and more.

xviii Preface

In addition to guaranteeing a broad coverage of relevant research methods by predominantly selecting domain‐general methods, the volume’s coverage was increased yet further by inviting authors to present several related methods within a single chapter, directing the readers to these methods’ similarities and differences. For instance, the authors of Chapter 2 contrast multiple conceptually related variants of the visual‐preference technique to study language development in very young children, at an age at which they do not yet produce language or their verbal produc- tions are still incomprehensible. The differences between the various implementa- tions of the general method are often subtle and could easily escape readers if not presented in opposition. Similarly, the authors of Chapter 14 discuss two non‐invasive functional neuroimaging methods, fMRI and fNIRS, that both make use of the fact that neural activity leads to changes in the local cerebral blood flow in the brain and that can both reveal which parts of the brain are activated while participants per- form a particular task. Contrasting the pros and cons of these two related techniques within a single chapter will help readers to make a well‐informed choice between the two during the planning of their own research project. Likewise, after detailing the specifics of the EEG/ERP methodology, in which electrical brain activity can be measured with a temporal resolution in the order of milliseconds, the authors of Chapter 13 contrast it with MEG, which provides a record of the magnetic activity of the brain. Chapter 15 differentiates multiple non‐invasive techniques for structural neuroimaging based on MRI, which reveals the neuroanatomy of language with good spatial resolution. Among the presented methods is tractography, a novel tech- nique for visualizing white matter pathways in the living human brain. Chapter 16 also presents various structural neuroimaging methods, but whereas in Chapter 15 the major focus is on the healthy brain, in this contribution the emphasis is on the lesioned brain. Yet another example of a chapter that presents several related methods is Chapter 17, where inter‐individual variability in language skills is linked to genetic variation. The specific method used depends on whether the studied trait is suspected to be monogenetic (due to a single genetic variant) or multifactorial (resulting from the combined effects of multiple genes). Finally, the chapters dealing with the Visual World Paradigm (Chapter 5) and priming (Chapters 6 and 7) actually concern families of related methods (e.g., masked priming and cross‐modal priming).

The inevitable consequence of choosing domain‐nonspecific methods as themes for the separate chapters was that ways of organizing them that appeared obvious at first sight turned out to be neither feasible nor appropriate on second thoughts: The chapters could not be organized according to the main areas of language study, input and output modalities, or the various structural subsystems that languages consist of. After all, most of the presented methods are not specifically tied to any such subdi- vision of study. A presentation according to the type of measures used, behavioral or neurobiological, would be more appropriate and feasible but is complicated by the fact that studies using neurobiological methods generally encompass behavioral measures as well, and the opposite also occurs. This is shown in many of the chapters, for instance in Chapter 16, where the authors illustrate the “two‐pronged” nature of most lesion studies, which combine structural neuroimaging data and a diversity of behavioral data that index patients’ linguistic performance. Another example con- cerns Chapter  7 on structural priming. Though in its early days this method only involved behavioral measures, it increasingly uses brain measures such as ERPs and the BOLD response that indexes brain activation in fMRI. Still, for most language

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researchers it makes sense to qualify methods as behavioral or neurobiological (and computational as a third category), so this is how we ordered the chapters, from primarily behavioral (Chapters 1‐10) and computational methods (Chapters 11 and 12) to neurobiological methods (Chapters 13‐17). But because the partitions between these classes of methods are not clear‐cut and a continued growth in inter- disciplinary research will likely result in their further integration, we have decided against explicitly labeling these three subsections in the table of contents.

In the preceding paragraphs almost all chapters have been introduced, however briefly. The exceptions were Chapter 9, on virtual reality, and Chapter 10, which presents ways for studying language outside the laboratory. These chapters were saved for now, where we mention two limitations of many traditional methods for studying language processing: Their ecological validity and external validity are often low; that is, their findings cannot easily be generalized to real‐world settings and to other populations and situations. The main reason why much traditional research lacks ecological validity is that in order to obtain reliable data and make sense of them, strict control over the experimental variables is required. Such con- trol can generally only be secured by using laboratory tasks that are impoverished substitutes of the real phenomena under study, the latter being stripped of many of their essentials, including the context in which they take place. The authors of Chapter 9 show how with virtual‐reality techniques it is possible to realize ecolo gical validity in the laboratory while at the same time controlling numerous experimental variables. The authors of Chapter 10 describe ways to enhance ecological validity and external validity by, for example, taking the experiment out of the laboratory into institutionalized public spaces such as museums, by crowdsourcing data on the internet, or by conducting cross‐cultural fieldwork. But unlike in research that makes use of virtual reality, in such studies maintaining experimental control is a real challenge.

A final feature that characterizes this volume is that many of its chapters contain the same or very similar sections, this resulting from our instructions to the authors. They were asked to explain the underlying assumptions and rationale of “their” method, to describe the required apparatus, the nature of the stimuli and data, the way the data are collected and analysed, and what the method’s strengths and weaknesses are in comparison to related methods. We also asked them to illustrate the method with an exemplary study so that the actual research practices and tools could be more vividly pictured, and to provide a glossary for easy accessibility of the method’s central concepts and features.

We are confident that the broad collection of research methods presented in this volume is varied enough for all beginning researchers interested in human language processing to find a topic to their liking and get going, and for researchers already active in language studies to become familiar with techniques they have not yet prac- ticed themselves.

Annette M. B. de Groot and Peter Hagoort

Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language: A Practical Guide, First Edition. Edited by Annette M. B. de Groot and Peter Hagoort. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Assumptions and Rationale

One of the biggest challenges of determining what an infant knows about language is actually tied to language itself. Unlike Piaget (1926), who famously asked older children to reflect on and discuss their understanding of the meaning of words, we have no such luxury of interviewing a 12‐month‐old regarding their word‐referent links. Even for developmentally simpler skills, we cannot get a 6‐month‐old to give a simple yes or no answer to the question of whether they discriminate two language sounds. It is somewhat paradoxical that language itself is a barrier to understanding

1 Habituation Techniques

Christopher T. Fennell

Abstract

This chapter presents the general aspects of the habituation technique. This technique has helped to address various language acquisition questions over the past half- century. While discussing implementations using different behavioural responses, the chapter focuses on the most common measure of habituation in language acquisition research: looking time (LT). Issues in implementing the method and potential prob- lems are discussed. The simplicity of the habituation procedure in both its design and implementation, along with its long history in the field, makes this method one of the fundamental tools that psycholinguists can use to uncover nascent, emerging, and maturing language skills during infancy and early childhood.

2 Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language

language development in infants. The fact that infants have little or no lexical pro- duction requires researchers to often turn to tasks that require no language output from the child. Further, infants’ limited motor skills restrict the measures that can reveal underlying linguistic abilities. Tasks must take advantage of gross motor abilities, such as full head turns (fine pointing or manual selection are difficult); con- genitally organized behaviors that infants have strong control over since birth, such as looking or sucking; or, basic psychophysiological responses, such as heart rate.

One of the most valid and reliable tools we have to examine the perceptual skills related to infant language is the habituation task. Habituation is a decrease in a response to a stimulus after repeated presentations. This produces what is termed the habituation curve, a monotonically decreasing behavior in response to a repeated target stimulus. It is a task with a very long history in our field, stretching back to the nineteenth century (for a review, see Thompson, 2009). Indeed, Thompson highlights that the concept is reflected in antiquity: in Aesop’s fables, a fox is quite frightened of a lion upon first meeting him, but becomes less alarmed upon each subsequent view- ing. Perhaps Aesop’s example was prescient. Habituation tasks were primarily used for decades with animals (and continue to be used with these populations), with everything from amoebas to dogs showing habituation responses (Harris, 1943).

Considering the long history of the task and ubiquitous nature of the habituation response across other non‐verbal beings (i.e., animals), it is unsurprising that the method was extended to infants in the early twentieth century (see Humphrey, 1933). However, simply habituating an infant to a stimulus is necessarily a bit limiting with respect to what one can say about learning. If, for example, an 8‐month‐old had a reduced behavioral response to the repeated presentation of a phoneme, one could argue that they have formed a memory of that particular sound. But it could also be that the infant is simply tiring. The key to demonstrating that the infant has formed a representation of or learned something about the presented stimulus is dishabituation— an increase in behavioral response to a novel stimulus.