NOTE: Given this blog's recent surge in popularity (props to Language Log, Language Hat, and something called EastSouthWestNorth blog) I decided to update and repost this because I believe in increasing the use of online methodologies for linguistic research and I hope to send some of you good folks reading this right now over to these good folks below and hopefully you will participate in their experiments. Generally it takes little of your time and the results could help further our understanding of just how the heck language works ('cause honestly, no one really knows).I happily request submissions of other online linguistics related experiments.
Original post here.
Experimental psycholinguists requires experimental subjects like any other empirical cognitive science. Unfortunately, researches are often constrained by limited resources. Typically, psycholinguists use college students bribed with money or extra credit as subjects. It's not unheard of for a published psycholinguistics study to have involved as few as 12 subjects. This has been a necessary evil because there has never been a good way to collect large numbers of subjects together and provide them with a coherent experimental design.
Lately, however, researchers are turning to the web as a place to conduct experiments with large groups of subjects. Yes, there are issues regarding control (e.g., if you need native speakers of English, how can you ensure that a subject really is a native speaker?), but these issues come up in all types of experimental paradigms. I believe that good standards and practices to ensure quality online psycholinguistic experiments will emerge over time. So, I'm all for moving ahead.
With that in mind, here are a set of sites offering online psycholinguistic experiments:
- The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics -- Online Experiments.
- The Portal for Psychological Experiments on Language (largest selection of experiments, that's a modified screen grab of some of their experiments above)
- Cognition and Language Laboratory (they have a blog too!)
- The Colour Imaging Research Group at the London College of Communication: Color Naming.
- CogLab2 (the Cognitive Psychology Online Laboratory)
- Other Web Experiments (from The Portal above).
- University of Essex's Lexical Decision Task demo.
- Psychological Research on the Net (Hanover College).
5 comments:
hello Chris, my congrats for your interesting blog and thank you for the link to our colour naming experiment.
I will agree that online experimental methodologies provide easy access to a large number of observers from culturally and demographically diverse populations in a short period of time. However as a researcher you will have to accept random distributed error to replace systematic control error in your data.
A good resource is a paper by Reips, U. D. (2000). The web experiment method: Advantages, disadvantages and solutions. In M. H. Birnbaum (Ed.), Psychological experiments on the internet (pp. 89-117). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Cheers
hello Chris, my congrats for your interesting blog and thank you for the link to our colour naming experiment.
I will agree that online experimental methodologies provide easy access to a large number of observers from culturally and demographically diverse populations in a short period of time. However as a researcher you will have to accept random distributed error to replace systematic control error in your data.
A good resource is a paper by Reips, U. D. (2000). The web experiment method: Advantages, disadvantages and solutions. In M. H. Birnbaum (Ed.), Psychological experiments on the internet (pp. 89-117). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Cheers
Cool, thanks for the citation. And best of luck with your research!
The most comprehensive list I know is the one at Hanover.
josh, excellent link, thanks!
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