Term paper

Your research question should be about human language production. For example, do phonologically related words in the native language facilitate or interfere with the language production in the second language?

The research question can be the same the paper you cite, but in that case you have to be clear about why the paper is not sufficient and the question is still worth asking when you refer to the paper.

Your research question needs to be specific. That is, you shouldn’t be asking "What is the relationship between content retrieval and structure building?" or ”How are kids different from adults in terms of language production?” because those are too broad. On the other hand, it shouldn’t be too specific like ”Do people produce a word X in context Y?” A better research question would be something between those in terms of specificity, like the one introduced in the beginning of this section.

You should reconsider questions like ”What if we take this paper and use stimuli X instead of stimuli Y?” or "What if we we test German speakers instead of English speakers for the study Z?" The idea itself may be good as a starting point, but you should go one step further and think about what you can learn by that modification in the design and turn it into a question about how the human mind works. For example, you shouldn't say "What if we use German stimuli with Momma et al. (2016)'s design?" but you might ask instead how partial/loose verb-finality affects the incrementality in verb production (compared to Momma et al., 2016), and decide to test German speakers as a way to address the question.

Refer to at least two papers as backgrounds to motivate your study, at least one from the class and at least one that we didn't read in the class. (OK to use the papers I shared but didn't discuss in the class.) If you really want to refer to two papers that we didn't read for the class, please consult with me early on (by the end of August at the latest).

The relationship between the two papers and your experiment can be whatever, as long as they are relevant:

• your study might reconcile two apparently conflicting studies.

• your study might extend one of the two papers, and the other might provide reasonable methods for that.

• etc

This minimal requirement about the prior papers doesn't mean that you can ignore other papers we read for the class. For example, if your argument clearly conflict with one of those papers, I expect you to discuss it whether or not you have already cited two other papers.

Propose an experiment that can address your research question. The idea is to write up a paper just like ones we read in the class, but without actual data or details about the design.

• Design an experiment including some details:
  What kind of measures will you use? (e.g. Picture description, sentence production with given words, etc.) Which population will you look at? (e.g. Speakers of Language X, Y years old kids and adults, etc.) What kind of stimuli will you use?
  You are not expected to describe the full details of the experiments, but you should describe at least the minimal details to explain what the experiment is like and how it works. For example, you don't need to provide the full set of stimuli, but you must provide one set for each condition. On the other hand, you are not expected to describe which university the participants are from, the number of electrodes in the EEG cap, or how long the fixation cross is presented on the monitor.

• Discuss the results with possible outcomes:
  Explain what the results will look like, and how that helps you answer the research question. 

• You can either deeply discuss one possible pattern of results that you expect, or cover multiple possibilities and respective implications.

• Of course you don't need to run the experiment, because this is just a proposal. However, it is OK to write the paper as if you have actually run the experiment or even report fake data (optional). But make sure you are consistent. Don't mix up "In the experiment, participants will..." and "The target word production was slower for..."

• Follow the structure specified below.

• Up to 3000 words excluding figures, captions, and the reference list. No minimal word counts.

• Double-spaced.

• Put the title and your name at the top of the first page and then begin the main text on the same page.

• A page number on each page.

• Other formats for better readability (e.g., reasonable font size and margins, headings, etc.)

You should expect average masters student in LST who haven’t taken this or a similar course (or you yourself before taking this course) as readers of your paper. Therefore you should explain jargons that those people might not know (e.g., content retrieval, SOA, etc.).

It is a good idea to include tables and figures from the prior studies and/or fake ones for your experiment. All tables and figures should be accompanied by a figure/table number and should be referred to with the number.

e.g., Figure 1 illustrates the EEG data of ...

It is your responsibility as the author to give credits to findings or ideas of other researchers. All prior works should be cited using the APA citation format, which is frequently used in the psycholinguistics literature. The website below provides useful examples for both in-text citation and the reference list: https://www.mendeley.com/guides/apa-citation-guide/

Introduce your study and convince the reader that they should read the rest of the paper.

• What the research question is.

• Why it is important to answer. (How does it contribute to understanding language production?)

Situate your research question and your experiment in the background literature.

Prior studies

• What are relevant things known in the literature

• What is not known = the gap in the literature

Current study

• How your experiment fills in the gap in the literature

• A brief description of the crux of your experiment would be needed to show this

• Subjects: What kind of speaker group will you test?

• Materials: What are the conditions?

• Tasks: What kind of tasks do the participants perform?

• Other important details specific to each study such as:

  • proficiency in English if you are looking into non-native English speakers.
    (You don't need to specify tests etc to assess the proficiency.)

  • the SOAs if you are using an interference paradigm just like Schriefers.

  • etc

Since you don't need to provide as much details as real experimental papers, you may not create subsections for participants, materials, etc as the papers we read.

• (Expected) data patterns

  • It is useful to show a fake figure (optional)

• Implications of the expected results

• Make sure to tie the expected results back to the research question.

• List the reference following the APA format.