The focus of this assignment is on the units about Speech Perception and Word Recognition, and the goal is to describe an idea for an experimental study that would further explore one of these areas. Imagine your audience is an advisor whom you are proposing a project to – perhaps you want to do an independent study or honors thesis, and you want to give them a sense of what you would like to work on and how you would do it. You don’t have all of the details worked out yet, but you have thought through the basics. We are especially interested in this assignment in how you frame your predictions – this is a separate item on the rubric (below). -Your idea should relate either to speech perception (including perception of sign languages) or word perception (spoken, written, or signed). Please focus on adults, not on children/acquisition. -You should use tasks/methods that we have read about this term. You have a lot of options (these are a mix of methods and tasks) – neuroimaging, eye tracking, EEG, semantic priming, crossmodal priming, categorization, ABX, visual world, lexical decision, etc. -Your idea should not be exactly the same as a study in the reading, but can be a minor variant that explores a related question. -If you want to better understand experiment design and get some more ideas, it is a good idea to read some of the primary literature (the original research articles) cited in the textbook. -If you take your inspiration from another study, that is fine – but please be explicit about it, cite that study, and make clear how your proposed study relates to that one. So here’s what you should write up – use these numbers in your answer so it’s clear for us to find each piece: -Background – what is the background and research question for your study? What is interesting to you or the field about this work? If you are basing your study on a previous study, please briefly describe and cite that study here. -Hypothesis – what is the hypothesis you are testing? Be as specific as possible. Task and Methods – how will you test your hypothesis? What methods and/or tasks will you use? Why have you chosen these for your specific hypothesis? -Experimental Design – what is/are your experimental condition(s)? Control condition(s)? Are you comparing groups of participants, or only groups of stimuli? Give several examples for each stimuli type. -Materials – what will your linguistic stimuli be like? Are there sound pairs? Word pairs? What sounds/words would you use? What stimuli do you need for your experimental condition vs control condition? -Predictions – if your hypothesis is correct, what results are predicted? You can use your textbook, lecture notes, discussion section notes, and other outside materials. If you use outside materials, make sure to cite them clearly (see below). Please be careful about plagiarism – if you copy text from any source it must be included with quotation marks and cited as a quotation.
