Linguists face the dual challenge of trying to understand language as a set of behaviors and as systems of knowledge, and as such, linguists often base their descriptions and analyses on some combination of naturalistic observation and introspection. Recently, various experimental methods are being employed to more rigorously test the accuracy of linguistic data and/or gather novel sorts of data. We will engage hands-on with some of these techniques, and students will learn about core aspects of experimental design, details of influential paradigms that have been used with language, and the types of conclusions that can be drawn from them.
