Experimental Design is intended for graduate students with prior coursework in phonology, language acquisition, or syntax. Students are expected to come to the course with research questions motivated by these areas.
The course examines behavioral experiments on language production and comprehension. Students read and discuss articles in psycholinguistics, focusing on how experiments are designed to test hypotheses, whether the results address those hypotheses, and what confounding factors may affect interpretation. Students also design behavioral experiments in class and collect and analyze data to evaluate their own research questions.