Many areas in the language sciences rely on collecting data from human participants, from grammaticality judgments to behavioural responses (key presses, mouse clicks, spoken responses). While data collection traditionally takes place face-to-face, recent years have seen an explosion in the use of online data collection: participants take part remotely, providing responses through a survey tool or custom experimental software running in their web browser, with surveys or experiments often being advertised on crowdsourcing websites like Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) or Prolific. Online methods potentially allow rapid and low-effort collection of large samples, and are particularly useful in situations where face-to-face data collection is not possible (e.g. during a pandemic); however, building and running these experiments poses challenges that differ from lab-based methods.

This course, developed by Prof Kenny Smith, from the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, provides a rapid tour of online experimental methods in the language sciences, covering a range of paradigms, from survey-like responses (e.g. as required for grammaticality judgments) through more standard psycholinguistic methods (button presses, mouse clicks) up to more ambitious and challenging techniques (e.g. voice recording, real-time interaction, iterated learning).  These course materials, which include weekly readings and programming tasks, also explore the main platforms for reaching paid participants, e.g. MTurk and Prolific, and discuss some of the challenges around data quality and ethics.

The course materials are released under a CC BY licence and are available on Github.

The 2022-2023 version of the course is now available and complete and jsPsych 7.3 compatible versions of all experiments are available there:

Online Experiments for Language Scientists ’22-23 version

Online Experiments for Language Scientists ’20-21 version.

Be aware, that the 2020-2021 version of this course and is now outdated

The code in the 2020-2021 course uses jsPsych 6.1.0, so you will find that the code does not function as intended with later versions of jsPsych – in particular, later versions of jsPsych have slightly different names for some kinds of data that plugins return (button_pressed has become response), which causes catastrophic errors in several places, so if you want to use this code as-is download version 6.1.0 from the jsPsych github page.

 

Header image by xresch from Pixabay