Psycholinguistics

The psycholinguistics course aims to give the necessary background to understand how experimental techniques initially coming from psychology and neurosciences can be integrated to answer typical questions in linguistics - and also why this is a very valuable approach. This includes an introduction to different types of research questions that can be tackled with different kinds of techniques, some background in basic ideas of hypothesis testing, but also questions of ethics and the general scientific method underlying this kind of research. Students will develop research questions to apply this newly acquired knowledge in small scale research projects.

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:             

• Learn how to approach a linguistic question using methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience
• Learn basic concepts of Experimental Linguistics: Experimental Design and Inferential Statistics: Why do we use these techniques in linguistic research and how do we do this?
• Generate a linguistic hypothesis and apply the newly learned concepts to a small-scale research project
• Acquire a certain level of independence to develop your own projects for your Master's theses

Some background knowledge in general linguistic questions that allow students to develop an interesting research hypothesis.