{"id":714,"date":"2019-06-06T08:19:21","date_gmt":"2019-06-06T08:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/?p=714"},"modified":"2019-06-11T02:22:14","modified_gmt":"2019-06-11T02:22:14","slug":"a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words-choosing-images-for-psycholinguistic-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2019\/06\/06\/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words-choosing-images-for-psycholinguistic-research\/","title":{"rendered":"A picture is worth a thousand words: Choosing images for psycholinguistic research"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linguists need to come up with different ways of testing our theories of how particular languages in the world function. We generally rely on two main methods of data collection \u2013 linguistic elicitation and corpus collection. With linguistic elicitation a linguist asks a speaker of a language: \u2018How do you say \u201cMonty Python is really funny\u201d in your language?\u2019 But can we be sure that what the speaker said is naturalistic and not just a word for word translation?<\/p>\n

Linguists need naturalistic data and can also record stories and conversations to build up a representative sample of a language (a corpus). This however takes a lot of time, effort and dedication on the part of both the linguist and the community of speakers of a language. It might even be that \u2013 after years of toil \u2013 the particular construction that a linguist wants to look at is under-represented with a dearth of examples in the corpus.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, there is a happy medium! We can combine cognitive psychological techniques and targeted linguistic elicitation, to create scenarios where speakers produce naturalistic responses. Of course, this technique brings with it another set of problems entirely.<\/p>\n

Psycholinguistic experiments need to be carefully designed and can\u2019t be made up on the fly in response to something a speaker of a language says to you; this is drastically different to standard linguistic elicitation where one can continually come up with new sentences to check, while in the middle of working with a speaker of a language.<\/p>\n

In our current research on optimal categorisation<\/a> we aim to find out how different nouns are assigned to different classifiers in a group of six related Oceanic languages spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. Each language has a different inventory size of classifying particles \u2014 from two to 23 \u2014 which are used in possessive constructions, and categorise the possession in terms of its use or functionality.<\/p>\n

Here are a few examples from the Iaai language, spoken in New Caledonia, which has the largest inventory of classifiers in our sample of languages:<\/p>\n

\r\n(1a)\ta-n\t\t\tw\u00e2\u00e2\t(b)\thanii-ny\t\tw\u00e2\u00e2\r\n        FOOD.CLASSIFIER-his\tfish \t\tCATCH.CLASSIFIER-his\tfish\r\n        \u2018his fish (to eat)\t\t        \u2018his fish (which he caught)\u2019\r\n(2a)\ta-n\t\t\tkoko\t(b)\tnoo-n\t\t\tkoko\r\n\tFOOD.CLASSIFIER-his\tyam\t\tPLANT.CLASSIFIER-his\tyam\r\n\t\u2018his yam (to eat)\u2019\t\t\t\u2018his yam plant\u2019\r\n<\/pre>\n
We want to see whether or not a particular noun that refers to a particular entity can occur with different classifiers, like with the words for \u2018fish\u2019 and \u2018yam\u2019 in Iaai above. Also, how does a language with 23 classifiers function differently from a language with just two or three classifiers?<\/p>\n
One way in which we can discover how the classifiers function in each language is to use a card sorting experiment. These experiments present speakers with entities in the form of pictures. Speakers are asked to sort them into different groups, first in a \u201cfree sort\u201d where they can create groups on any basis they feel is relevant and important, and second, in a \u201cstructured sort\u201d where they are asked to group entities according to which classifier they would use in a possessive construction. By doing this with lots of participants we can see individual speaker variation in language usage in one language and across languages and get a clear sense of if and how a language\u2019s classifier system is influencing the way that speakers think about and process different entities.<\/p>\n
Once we have decided on which nouns to test in a card sort experiment we have to find or make pictures that represent these images. Sadly I don\u2019t have the artistic skills of Michelangelo and won\u2019t be painting any masterpieces for the experiment!\u00a0 <\/p>\n