Topic:

Intro to psychological experimentation and data analysis

Exercise 1:

Run relevant canned experiments from the Stanford Cognitive Psychology Package---see list.

Assignment 1 (due at the beginning of "bof" the first class of Week 2 = Wednesday, Sept 6):

Write summary descriptions of each of three experiments. One should be from among the starred (*) cases. You choose the other two. Identify possible confounds. Invent a new experiment that improves on or is inspired by one of the experiments you tried. (2 pages)

Reading (Sept 6):

SPSS manual---Chapters 3, 4, and 5---covering hypothesis testing and intro to ANOVA---handout.

Reading (Sept 13):

Picasso, P. (1923) Art as Individual Idea---handout. See also the following relevant info.

Exercise 2:

Intro to statistical analysis (SPSS). Analyze Paired-Associate Learning Results, Judgments on Words (Descriptive Stats, Unpaired Comparison, Paired Comparison, ANOVA). See the data format table for helpful info.

Assignment 2: (bof 1st class of 4th week = Sept 18)

Use SPSS to analyze the data from two of the experiments. Report the results using standard experimental-writeup format, following the guidelines in Thaiss and Sanford. (3 pages + figures)

Topic:

Phonetics and speech recognition

Reading (Chapters 1, 2, 3 by Sept 20. Chapter 8 by Sept 25)

Ladefoged, P. Phonetics (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 8)---handout

Exercise:

Intro to spectrographic analysis (Macquirer Exercises)

Assignment 3 (due at end of first class of 5th week = Sept 25):

Phonetics problems.

Experiment:

Replication of Lisker and Abramson (1970).

Experiment:

Replication of Ganong (1980).

Assignment 4: (due end of second class of 6^th week = Oct 4)

Full writeup by each person of the experiment. (4 pages)

Topic:

Meaningful language processing

Overview:

The class works as a group to perform one of the following experiments:

Experiment:

Replication of Roediger and MacDermott (1995)

Experiment:

Replication of Johnson (1965)

Experiment:

Replication of Bock and Loebell (1990)

Experiment:

Replication of Trueswell (1994) or Trueswell (1996)

Experiment:

Replication of Swinney (1979)

Assignment 5: (due end of 9^th week = Oct. 29)

Full writeup (4 pages).

Topic:

Corpus analysis and preparing for final project

Assignment 6: (due end of 10^th week = Nov. 5)

Use a corpus to estimate lexical parameters for the Trueswell (1994) model. Analyze the fit of the parameterized model and report on the results. (2 pages).

Reading:

Background reading for final project.

Assignment 7: (due end of 10^th week = Nov. 5)

Write a proposal for final, independent experiment (3 pages).

Topic:

Class-designed experiment

Assignment 8: (due beginning of 14^th week = Nov. 29)

Run the proposed experiment. Write-up the results (minimum 5 written pages, not counting figures and references).

Assignment 9: (due last day of class = Dec 13)

interpretation if necessary.