Project specs

We are at a point in the semester when we must start considering the final project. This final project is now for everyone (rather than having a final during finals period for LX350’ers).

The project overall is to design an experiment that you could run. Not to run it, but to design it. You could run it later, if you want. (Although if you really do plan to run it talk to me about interacting with the Institutional Review Board, since you need to get approval first.)

The goal is to have a question that your experiment will answer, something that has some theoretical relevance to language acquisition. The result you will turn in will be a write-up that’s generally modeled on the papers we’ve been reading, apart from lacking “participants”, “results”, and “conclusion” sections.

This write-up is due officially on May 2, the last day of Spring classes.

Next week (Thu Apr 25) you should try to establish the baseline at least of what you want to do this on, and hand that in.

• Pick a population/condition: are you aiming to learn something about second language acquisition? Bilingual acquisition?

• Pick a broad area of linguistic analysis: are you aiming to learn something about syntax? Semantics? Phonology? Lexical development?

• Narrow in on a specific question or kind of question. This is the hard part of course. And this might be somewhat independent of the first one. Possibly inspirations might be found in the papers we’ve looked at. If something is true of children acquiring L1 French, is there something that might raise a question about whether it is also true of children acquiring L1 Japanese? Or of children with L1 Japanese acquiring L2 French? Or of adults with L1 Japanese acquiring L2 French? Modeling your design on an existing study but changing either the subject type or methodology or materials is a perfectly good place to draw inspiration. You might even take advantage of the fact that this is a thought experiment: if the question you wonder about requires a population L1 Japanese L2 Nahuatl speakers who moved over 10 years ago to a mostly Catalan speech community, this would be a hard experiment to do in reality. But you can explain why it would reveal something interesting. If you are really having a hard time coming up with something, you can probably just pick a paper we’ve looked at (or one nearby, like that cites it or is cited by it), and then consider changing the languages and work out what would need to change in the materials and whether we might expect the result to be the same.

On the penultimate day of class, possibly the last day as well, it would be interesting to hear very brief presentations on what you each have. That had been the plan from the outset, although we are moving so late on this project that the presentations will necessarily be short and the projects will be ideas. But I still think it may wind up being a fun exercise.

The actual write-up? It should be as long as it needs to be, but what I’m envisioning is something that’s probably 5-10 pages long. Long enough to explain what the rationale of the study is, some background including what you know of that has been done on the question so far, the details of the question, the materials and approach you’ll take to answering the question, how you can analyze the results you’d get, and what the answers you’d get would imply for our theory of language acquisition. There are enough little things to say that I think it will easily fill 5 pages, but slow down if you start getting much past 10.

One thing that I do want to see is at least a couple of example items – sentences you are testing or words you are looking for. Essentially the materials of the experiment. If you plan to test 150 sentences, you don’t need to create them all. But create 2 of each type to use as examples.

I’m not going to differentiate between LX 350 and LX 650 in terms of what I expect, although if you are planning on maybe really doing this experiment later, you may want to put more thought into the design and materials now.