Informed Consent Examples

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I just realized that I hadn’t provided you with the examples I’d promised of some Informed Consent forms.

Here are some sample Informed Consent forms, which were provided to me some time ago by Bruce Fraser (SED). These are not specific to studies in Linguistics, but it gives you the idea of what they say.

The main points to observe is that the form tells the study participant (a) what the (general) purpose of the study is, (b) the nature of the participation requested (e.g., filling out a questionnaire about sentences) and how long it should take, (c) that participation is voluntary and that s/he can choose to leave the study, (d) the level of risk posed by participating (here, there is little to no risk), (e) a statement that the identity of the participants will remain confidential. The signature from the participant confirms that these points have been understood.

This is something that you need to provide whenever you do a study with human subjects, although obviously in many fields of science the risks participants might face will be greater. Let me know if you have any questions about this part of the project.

Friday, 2 hours from here at UConn: Nina Hyams

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Although I know it’s probably a little bit unlikely that anyone here will be able to go, I’ve learned that Nina Hyams will be at UConn on Thursday and Friday April 21-22. It’s a 2-hour drive, so it’s kind of within reach. Anyway, here are the details for her Friday colloquium, just in case.

Colloquium
SPEAKER: Nina Hyams, University of California, Los Angeles
DATE/TIME: Friday, April 22, 2011, 4:30pm [Dinner to be served following the talk]
LOCATION: Arjona Building, Room 311

“When tense and aspect compete in child language”

A particularly robust finding concerning children’s early use of tense/ aspect morphology is that its distribution is strongly conditioned by the lexical aspect (or telicity) of the verb: past/perfective morphology is largely restricted to telic verbs while present/imperfective morphology is found most frequently on atelic verbs. Most explanations for the skewed distribution implicate the cognitive or linguistic mechanisms children use to acquire temporal morphology. Wagner (2001) refers to this idea as the ‘(lexical) aspect first hypothesis’ (AFH), as follows: children initially use tense and grammatical aspect morphology to mark lexical aspect. However, Hyams (2007) shows that the temporal meanings of RIs and other non-finite root forms (in typologically distinct languages) are also contingent on aspect. For example, in early English bare (non-finite) telic predicates tend to denote past events and atelic bare verbs have present reference. Thus, the ‘aspect first’ distribution cannot simply be an effect of the (mis-)mapping of tense/aspect morphology, but is instead related to the event structure of the verb. In this talk I will suggest that during the RI stage the assignment of temporal reference in finite clauses involves a competition between tense anchoring (as in adult grammar) and aspectual anchoring, the later being the mechanism used by children to assign temporal reference to RIs and other non-finite clause (Hyams 2007). This ‘competing anchors model (CAH)’ is an extension of the Hyams’ 2007 ‘aspectual anchoring hypothesis’. In addition to capturing the parallel behavior of finite and non-finite clauses that children produce, the CAH provides an explanation for several (otherwise) puzzling findings concerning their (mis-)comprehension of various temporal structures.

Example topics

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Although there are a number of details I’d still like to fill in, including linking in some references I have, adding more, etc., I’m ready to declare the example topics fit for consumption.

If you go to the readings page, and click on the jump link to readings related to individual topics, you’ll see a big list of topics that somebody has done a project on in the past. Some topics have been looked at by a couple of different people. I have tried to include at least a brief description of the study performed, and give some relevant references for the topic.

Your task: Read through the whole list, and see if any of these suggest ideas to you about topics you might want to study. Maybe with different languages? Maybe with a different subject population, or with a different method? You are in fact free to just choose one of the previously used topics as well, if you find one that seems interesting. Even if somebody else has done it before, you will almost certainly do it somewhat differently, and you might well get more definitive results or see different implications.

Schedule: As you will be aware, this is spring break. You may, if you wish, spend some of that time looking at this. The topic proposal itself won’t be due until the Thursday of the return from spring break, March 24. The proposal should be just basically a page outlining what topic you want to look at, what readings you think will be relevant, how you might approach it experimentally. The next task after this will be the design of the study itself, but for the proposal, the main thing is to choose a topic, a question to answer.

Topic examples coming soon

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Though I’d meant to have them ready by now, I will soon add a list of topics that people have done in the past (with some related readings) to the end of the readings page. They aren’t there yet, as of right now, but they should be there within a day. I’ll post something here once I’ve added them in.

Update: I’ve gotten partway through putting in a couple of notes about several past projects people have done, if you are anxiously waiting to have a look. I intend to continue to expand these a bit more, but you might already be able to get some ideas.

Sanity checks for the wh-question data for the CHILDES lab

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I wanted to provide a couple of “hints” of a sort concerning the wh-question data for the CHILDES lab (section two), just as a means of checking whether what you find/found is similar to what I found. The exact numbers you come up with aren’t going to be the same as mine anyway, since so much rides on the exact choices you make about which utterances are included and which are excluded, etc.

However: I found roughly 30 wh-questions in Nina’s early files, and a little under 200 wh-questions in Nina’s later files. I wound up excluding around 20-30% of the utterances at each stage, and of the utterances that count (where the wh-word is not the subject), I found that very, very nearly all were on one side of the divide between having and lacking a subject. In fact, I found that all but one of about 150 utterances across all files, both early ones and late ones, were of the same type.

So, if this is not approximately what you found, then you probably missed something somewhere. There will be variation because there is an element of subjectivity to doing these counts (and that’s not a good thing, but it’s kind of an inescapable thing), but if your numbers are different from these by a lot, then check with me before getting much further.

MLU results from CHILDES

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When you work on the discussion section of the CHILDES write-up, I ask you to compare your results to some that were reported by Valian (1991). However, one thing that I should really point out: The MLU counts you found in the first section of the lab are probably incomparable to Valian’s.

This is inconvenient, but the reason is this: The mlu command in the CHILDES transcript browser computes the Mean Length of Utterance in terms of average morphemes per utterance by default. Valian’s results, however, were stated in terms of average words per utterance. So, to really do the comparison properly—that is, to compare Nina’s behavior to what Valian’s subjects did—you will probably need to basically do the first step of the lab assignment again, except this time telling the mlu command to count words instead of morphemes.

The way you do this is to provide -t%mor as a parameter to the mlu command, which means “omit the %mor tier. That is, you want a parameter string like:

+t*CHI -t%mor nina0*

(“include only the CHI tier (child utterances), but exclude the %mor tier (morpheme-by-morpheme breakdown), for all of the files whose name begins with nina0.”)

Incidentally, an additional unnecessarily confusing aspect of this, the results are still reported as being a ratio of morphemes over utterances, even with the -t%mor option included, but what it means is the ratio of words to utterances in that case.

To have discovered this for yourself, you could have just pressed the Run button with no parameters after selecting mlu as the command; this displays the “help” summary for the mlu command, which contains the warning: “MLU NOW WORKS ON “%mor:” TIER BY DEFAULT. TO RUN MLU ON MAIN SPEAKER TIER PLEASE USE “-t%mor:” OPTION.” You might have had no reason to look, but it’s good to know how to get the help text in general.

The rest of the CHILDES lab is now posted

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Ok, I think I’m now satisfied enough with the description of the rest of the CHILDES lab assignment, so you can go ahead and follow the instructions there in your effort to create a short write-up of the lab experiment.

As a reminder, the point is to by the end have all three sections of the lab assignment done. If you did only the first part for yesterday, then you still have the second part (finding some numbers with CHILDES) and the third part (doing the write-up) left to do.

The readings page is getting away from me

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I just realized that I still need to make some adjustments to the readings page (and to the schedule) to reflect our actual pace through my planned set of topics. In particular, Tuesday is the “parameters in L2” day, not the “verb-particle constructions” day, and I had at least in one of these cases listed an absurd amount of readings (some unlinked) as “main readings.” Give it until tonight before consulting the readings page, I’ll try to smooth it out shortly so that it more accurately reflects both the schedule and an appropriate set of readings.

HW1 Reprieve: Question threshold reached, it’s now due Tuesday.

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I’ve gotten enough questions about homework #1 that I’m going to make it due on Tuesday, not tomorrow. I’ll talk a bit about it tomorrow to try to make it clearer what I’m going for there—it does make sense, but I think it wasn’t stated in a clear enough way.

If you somehow happen to be reading this before having attempted to work it out, then (a) tsk tsk, you should start working on this sooner, and (b) do try to puzzle over it a little bit anyway before class, so that when we talk about it, you’ll know what’s at issue.