Experimental Research Methods in Sociolinguistics

✍ Scribed by Katie Drager

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 217
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Research Methods in Experimental Sociolinguistics is an accessible, user-friendly guide to the variety of different experimental methods used in sociolinguistics. The text steps through the “how-to” of experimental methods used to investigate variation in both speech production and perception. All throughout it is aimed at practice and application. Experimental methods are used to explain and map out causation: these methods are growing in popularity with linguistics and a book mapping these is much needed.
Drager’s textbook takes the reader from defining the research question through to finding an appropriate research framework through to completing the project. Advice is given on ethics, how to measure production and perception and on how to construct and use corpora in this type of research. Both paid for and free tools are covered as well as statistics in experimental linguistics. The book includes a companion website with information on experiment-friendly software, sample experiments and suggestions for work to undertake.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Illustration
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Defining and constraining the research question
1.1. What is an experiment?
1.2. Experimental methods: who needs them and how do you choose one?
1.3. Perception experiments
1.3.1. Perceiving speaker characteristics and measuring attitudes
1.3.2. The processing and intelligibility of native and non-native dialects and forms
1.3.3. Social information priming linguistic behavior
1.4. Production experiments
1.5. A link between production and perception
1.6. Individual differences
1.7. Chapter summary
Further reading
2 Some practicalities when running experiments
2.1. Logistics of running an experiment
2.1.1. Getting the right stimuli: recording and design
2.1.2. What to measure
Reaction times
Forced-choice responses
Open-ended responses
2.1.3. Disguising the hypothesis
2.1.4. Item repetition
2.1.5. Randomization
2.1.6. Counterbalancing and Latin Square design
2.1.7. Priming
2.1.8. Effects from the experimenter, location, and other potential primes
2.1.9. Experimental software: in the lab, in the field, and online
2.1.10. Headphones or not?
2.1.11. Practice tasks
2.2. Recruiting participants
2.3. Ethics in experimental work
2.3.1. Ethics during data collection
2.3.2. Ethical considerations for data storage
2.3.3. Ethics in reporting results
2.4. Publishing work in experimental sociolinguistics
2.5. Chapter summary
Further reading
3 Experimental designs to examine perception
3.1. A focus on the social
3.1.1. Rating tasks
3.1.2. Categorization task: social categories
3.1.3. Open response
3.1.4. Implicit Association Tests
3.1.5. The Social Category Association Test
3.2. Social factors influencing perception
3.2.1. Phoneme monitoring task
3.2.2. Identification task
3.2.3. Discrimination task
3.2.4. AXB task
3.2.5. Matching task
3.2.6. Coach test
3.2.7. Transcription tasks
3.2.8. Translation tasks: intelligibility
3.2.9. Sentence verification and plausibility test
3.2.10. Gating tasks
3.2.11. Lexical decision task
3.3. Chapter Summary
Further reading
4 Experimental designs to examine production
4.1. Multi-purpose tasks
4.1.1. Interviews, conversations, and corpora
4.1.2. Reading tasks and wordlists
4.1.3. Translation tasks: production
4.1.4. Picture naming
4.1.5. Picture book narration
4.1.6. Silent movie narration
4.1.7. Enactment
4.1.8. Semi-structured games
4.2. Su.rveys and questionnaires
4.2.1. Semantic differential questions
4.2.2. Sentence completion and fill in the blank task
4.2.3. Grammaticality and acceptability judgments
4.2.4. Odd one out task
4.3. Exam.ple production experiment #1
4..4. Tasks for studying accommodation
4.4.1. Map task
4.4.2. Dialogue-based picture matching (Diapix) task
4.4.3. Tangram tasks
4.4.4. Imitation/shadowing
4.5. Exa.mple production experiment #2
4.6. Ch.apter summary
Further reading
5 Open frontiers
5.1. Eye-tracking
5.2. Mouse-tracking
5.3. Event-related potentials
5.4. Experiments for working with children
5.5. Ultrasound
5.6. Chapter summary
Further reading
6 Statistics for experimental sociolinguistics
6.1. A crash course in using R
6.1.1. Setting up a spreadsheet
6.1.2. Getting started
6.2. Creating plots and graphs
6.2.1. Scatterplots
6.2.2. Density plots
6.2.3. Line graphs
6.2.4. Bar plots and histograms
6.2.5. Box and whisker plots
6.2.6. Bean plots
6.3. Preparing to conduct statistical analysis
6.4. An introduction to statistical methods
6.4.1. Correlations
6.4.2. Wilcoxon Rank Sum and Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test
6.4.3. Chi-squared
6.4.4. Fisher’s Exact
Why not Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)?
6.5. Mixed effects models
6.5.1. Linear regression with random effects
Interpreting the output of a linear regression model
Plotting effects within the context of a linear mixed effects model
Checking for improvement of model fit
6.5.2. Logistic regression with random effects
6.5.3. Ordered regression with random effects
6.6. The beloved p-value
6.7. Chapter summary
Further reading
7 Moving forward
7.1. Publishing replications and null results
7.2. Conclusion
References
Index