Course Description
Experimental methods have become an integral part of semantics and pragmatics. This course provides a hands-on introduction. Some basic background either in semantics/pragmatics or psycholinguistics will be useful, but the course will be self-contained and open and accessible regardless of background. The goal is to get students started on tackling the technical and methodological intricacies involved and position them to develop first experimental studies of their own. We start with a mini-tutorial on the PCIbex platform, which we’ll use for hands-on work on various experimental paradigms. Along the way, basic principles of experimental design are introduced. The second part of the course reviews sample designs and methodological approaches from the literature. This will include truth-value judgment tasks, picture selection tasks and covered box designs, as well as inference and acceptability rating tasks and self-paced reading (and advanced students may want to explore more intricate methods). Topics will draw on the recent literature, including reference resolution, quantification, domain restriction, presupposition, and implicature. Basic designs of selected studies will be replicated on PCIbex in group work, with subsequent exploration of variations. In the final part of the course, students will implement an experimental design of their own, either in groups or individually.
Area Tags: Semantics, Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Science, Experimental Methods
(Session 2) Tuesday/Friday 10:30-11:50
Location: ILC S140
Instructor: Florian Schwarz
Florian Schwarz is an Associate Professor and the Undergraduate Chair in the Linguistics department at UPenn, and also serves as the Associate Director for Education of mindCORE. He is an associate editor for Glossa Psycholinguistics and Natural Language Semantics. His research and teaching is concerned with the study of meaning, with particular interests in presuppositions, definites, intensional semantics, and – more recently – social meaning. In much of his work, he combines formal tools from semantics and pragmatics with experimental methods from psycholinguistics. Under the lead of Jeremy Zehr, his lab maintains PCIbex, a tool for implementing and hosting experiments online.
