A few sample research designs

1. A few sample research designs Heidi Lorimor Ling 225 ‘International Talk Like a Pirate Day”, 2007

2. A good research project must be: • Concise • Testable • Controlled • Grounded in research, testing a prediction made by other studies • An “alternative” hypothesis – expect to see a difference between two groups • Approved by the IRB!

3. 3 Research Studies • Russian Agreement Attraction • English Conjunct Agreement & Duration Analysis • Arabic-English Heritage Speakers

4. Russian Agreement • “The format for the editing commands are: [address1[,address2]][function][arguments] where the addresses are optional and can be separated from the function by spaces or tabs.” Introduction to Unix textbook. Fiamingo et al., (1998) • “…the scheduling of these holidays are subject to departmental approval.” University of Illinois Calendar, 2004 • “Minority ownership of businesses are up.” George W. Bush in 3rd presidential debate, 10/13/04

5. Russian Agreement Subject-Verb Agreement Normal: Subject HEAD noun agrees in number with the verb The professor with the excellent studentsstudies in the library Attraction: Plural marker from LOCAL noun (interloper) agrees in number with the verb The professor with the excellent students study in the library

6. Russian Agreement • Does morphological case play a role in how often attraction occurs? • Agreement and structural Case are “two sides of the same coin” (Boeckx, 2004; seealso Chomsky, 1999:35) • Morphological case reduces the rate of attraction in Dutch and German for non-homophonous case endings (Hartsuiker, Schriefers, Bock, and Kikstra, 2004) • Expect to see reduction in attraction when overt morphology signals a distinction between subjects and non-subjects

7. Russian Agreement • 128 participants • All native Russian speakers • Recent immigrants taking English classes at a community center in Chicago or • Affiliated with the University of Illinois • 2 Procedures • Sentence Completion Task, n=96 (Bock & Miller, 1991) • Modified Sentence Completion Task, n=32(Vigliocco et al.’s (1995) Design, Exp. 2)

8. Russian Agreement • Procedure: • Hear preamble • Repeat preamble and complete sentence • Experimenter advances tape to next trial

9. Example Trial • Hear: “The picture in the magazines” • Respond: “The picture in the magazines is pretty”

10. Modified Completion Task • Same procedure as sentence completion task, except… • Provided unmarked verb or adjective • Then played preamble • Participants repeated preamble and completed the sentence, using the word provided

11. Materials • 32 experimental items & 64 fillers • 4 versions of each experimental item • SS билет на концерт ‘ticket to the concert’ • SP билет на концерты ‘ticket to the concerts’ • PS билеты на концерт ‘tickets to the concert’ • PP билеты на концерты ‘tickets to the concerts’ • Same fillers for each list. • Items balanced for gender in each group: • MM 8 masculine head – masculine local • MF 8 masculine head – feminine local • FM 8 feminine head – masculine local • FF 8 feminine head – feminine local • Crossed Number x Gender: 2 of each possible combination

12. Russian Agreement • Coded for: • Singular Verb/Adjective • Plural Verb/Adjective • Unmarked for number • Miscellaneous response

13. Russian Agreement 4091 Scorable responses (72% marked as Singular or Plural) * = significant at p < .05

14. Russian Agreement “defekt v mashinakh” defect in cars “bilet na konserty” ticket to concerts

15. Russian Agreement • Agreement attraction seems to occur less often in case-marking languages: (Bock, Carreiras, Meseguer, & Octigan, 2004; Hartsuiker, Schriefers, Bock, & Kikstra, 2003, Exp. 1; Vigliocco, Butterworth & Garrett, 1996) Possible Explanations: • Feedback account:homophonous plural marker increases plural agreement (Dell, 1986; Stemberger, 1985) • Monitoring account:potential attractors are eliminated via cues of morphological case (Levelt, 1983, 1989)

16. Russian Agreement • Are agreement patterns influenced by notional number? • In English and Spanish, notional plurality increases rate of plural agreement about 10% (Bock et al., 2004) • If notional agreement effects are instances of semantics overriding grammatical agreement processes, expect increased plural agreement with notionally plural subjects even when morphological cues reduce the rate of attraction

17. Russian Agreement Distributivity Effects on Notional Number Is this one thing or many things? A few preambles – translated: Non-Distributive---------------------------------Distributive The boss of the manicurists The request of the mothers The danger in the cities The illustration in the books The neighbor of the musicians The defect in the cars

18. Russian Agreement * Total SP plurals: 8(non-dist) and 31(distributive)

19. Russian Agreement • Attraction does occur in Russian • Significant effect of plural attraction • Overt case-marking reduces the rate of attraction However… • Notional agreement still occurs, and plural agreement can arise because of notional plurality

20. 3 Research Studies • Russian Agreement Attraction • English Conjunct Agreement & Duration Analysis • Arabic-English Heritage Speakers

21. English Conjunct Agreement • Can meaning intervene and influence syntax? • The family of rats is living in my garage. • 5 dollars are all you need. • Bacon and eggs are on the table. • Reading and writing are important for a child’s success.

22. English Conjunct Agreement • Can meaning intervene and influence syntax? • The family of rats is living in my garage. • The family of rats are living in my garage. • 5 dollars are all you need. • 5 dollars is all you need. • Bacon and eggs are on the table. • Bacon and eggs is on the table. • Reading and writing are important for a child’s success. • Reading and writing is important for a child’s success.

23. English Conjunct Agreement • Noun + Noun = ? • What are the agreement properties of conjoined noun phrases? • Are conjunctions always plural? • If there is variability, is it semantically conditioned?

24. English Conjunct Agreement Conjunct type Examples from World Wide Web • simple count The month and day that a health benefits plan first goes into effect becomes its anniversary date… (www.cigna.com) • simple mass Any principal and interest on the notes is payable… (www.news.moneycentral.msn.com) • deverbal Selecting and double-clicking on the entry within the alarm log launches… (www.cisco.com)

25. English Conjunct Agreement Verb Elicitation Procedure • Play the beginning of a sentence • Hear: “The milk and cheese” • Participant repeats sentence beginning and finishes the sentence, telling us “where things are” • Say: “The milk and cheese were on the table” • (Elicits verb: was, were, is, are)

26. English Conjunct Agreement Verb Elicitation Procedure • Four types of experimental preambles: • Simple Count “the name and address” • Simple Mass “the tea and coffee” • Deverbal Count “the operation and recovery” • Deverbal Mass “the singing and dancing” • Prediction: • Abstract and less enumerable noun phrases should “coalesce”, creating noun phrases that are notionally singular, and producing singular verbs More abstractLess Abstract Deverbal Mass & Count Simple Mass Simple Count

27. English Conjunct Agreement Verb Elicitation Procedure • Four types of experimental preambles: • Simple Count “the name and address” • Simple Mass “the tea and coffee” • Deverbal Count “the operation and recovery” • Deverbal Mass “the singing and dancing” • Controls: • Syllable Length balanced across all lists • Orders reversed for each item and for whole list • Constrained instruction set: “tell us where things are” – provides highly uniform responses, but still “natural” production

28. English Conjunct Agreement operation and recovery reading and writing museum and church disk and hardcopy tea and coffee dm: “the singing and dancing” dc: “the operation and recovery” sm: “the tea and coffee” sc:“the name and address”

29. English Conjunct Agreement • Meaning matters • Conjunctions don’t have to be plural; speakers can optionally view them as becoming one entity, and therefore employ singular agreement • Abstract, non-enumerable nouns are more likely to undergo coalescence, demonstrating semantic influences on syntactic production

30. English Conjunct Agreement • If “coalescence” is responsible for singular agreement, we might be able to see a prosodic correlate • If "(X and Y) is"  is a single unit • Expect to see less of a pause after X • Perhaps a longer pause after the conjunction to create prosodic unit? • "(X) and (Y) are" is built of two units • Expect to see a greater pause after X

31. 3 Research Studies • Russian Agreement Attraction • English Conjunct Agreement & Duration Analysis • Arabic-English Heritage Speakers

32. Arabic-English Heritage Speakers • Hypothesis: Heritage speakers will have predictable gaps in their grammars that… • Participants: Egyptian and Jordanian Heritage Speakers, and control groups of native speakers • Materials... • Procedure…