Syllabus

The class has three themes:

To introduce you to psycholinguistic theories of variation in production. What drives speakers' choices between different word orders (e.g. in the ditransitive alternation), different morphological variants (e.g. contracted vs. full auxiliaries)? Do they avoid potential ambiguities or try to ease production or comprehension processing in some other form?

To provide you with an introduction to at least one syntactic search software (TGrep2) and tools we developed to combine output of this search software into a database that you can import into excel or a statistics program (these tools are in the developmental stage and have not been release previously). We also plan to give you a super fast intro to the basics of the statistical methods employed in modern corpus-based research on language production.

To provide a forum for a discussion of the relative trade-offs of corpus-based vs. experiment-based psycholinguistic research. What does corpus-based work to offer? What are the current limitations?

This is an introductory class. I was asked by the LSA to provide a basic introduction and since many of you have not worked with corpora before, we will probably not get into the more advanced statistical aspects of corpus-based work, but I hope that we can give you enough of a background to get you started on corpus-based work and to connect to the community of researchers that is doing this type of work.

Date	Description/Notes	Readings for this class	Assignment due
7/7/2009	Psycholinguistic accounts of processing and communicative efficiency Availability, Alignment, Domain Minimization, Ambiguity Avoidance, and Uniform Information Density Lecture1.pdf	Jaeger and Norcliffe (in press) -- only Section 2 [7pp] Branigan et al. (2007) [18pp] Hawkins (2007) [21pp] Haywood et al. (2005) [5pp] Optional readings on accessibility, dependency minimization, and ambiguity avoidance	12pm, Fr, 7/10/09
7/8/2009	You are highly encouraged to attend the evening tutorial on logistic regression (Note: different time & location: TBA, 7-9pm)
7/9/2009	An introduction to TGrep2: a syntactic search software (laptops welcome) Lecture2.pdf	TGrep2 Manual
7/14/2009	The relation between psycholinguistic and other approaches more on psycholinguistic accounts; also grammaticalization, semantic accounts, sociolinguistic accounts Lecture3.pdf	Jaeger (submitted) [33pp] Frank and Jaeger (2008) [6pp] Bresnan and Hay (2007) [15pp] Optional readings on Uniform Information Density, gradient grammar and grammaticalization of variation, semantic accounts, and sociolinguistic and variationist work	12pm, Fr, 7/17/09
7/15/2009	If you're interested in the analysis of continuous corpus outcomes such as word durations, pitch accents, etc., consider attending the evening tutorial on linear mixed models (Note: different time & location: TBA, 7-9pm)
7/16/2009	More on TGrep2 and the TGrep2 Database Tools (laptops welcome) Lecture4.pdf	TDT manual
7/21/2009	An introduction to logistic regression in R Lecture5.R	Baayen (2008) -- only Section 6.3 [20pp] Jaeger (2008) [13pp] Johnson (2009) [25pp] Optional readings on Statistics	12pm, Wed, 7/22/09
7/23/2009	Corpora vs. Experiments: Trade-offs Lecture6.pdf We'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of corpora compared to running experiments in the lab. This will lead us to look a bit more at mixed models which provide control for individual speaker effects which make the analysis of corpus data more complicated. I hope that most of you can attend the evening tutorials, so that we can use this session to go through more advanced questions and for questions you have regarding your final projects.