Psycholinguistics studies the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to comprehend, produce and use language. This course will introduce the most important insights and questions in this field using recent research literature.

Experimental data play an essential role in psycholinguistic research. This course provides training in how to design, conduct, analyze and report your own experiments. This requires good knowledge of current research methods and techniques, and insight in their limitations.

Specific topics:

Week 1: Linguistics as part of cognitive science. Information encoding in the brain.

Methods: Null hypothesis testing, working with statistical software (R).

Week 2: Memory and language: Encoding, storage and retrieval and their relevance for language processing.

Methods: Experiments and quasi-experiments, experimental designs, validity.

Week 3: Language disorders, aphasia. Linguistic analyses of aphasic speech.

Methods: Significance, power, and effect size.

Week 4: Comprehending sentences: computing grammatical structure and meaning.

Methods: ANOVA

Week 5: Spoken utterance planning, phonological encoding.

Methods: Correlation, linear regression, reliability, multiple regression.

Week 6: Using language: Speaker meaning and discourse.

Methods: Mixed-effects modeling, crossed random effects

Week 7: Using language: Anticipation and emotion