Psycholinguistics (Master S1/S3 CLass)

Basic information

• Credits: 3
• Format: 2 hours weekly
• 2026-2027 instructors: Barbara Hemforth
• 2026-2027 schedule: Thursdays, 16:00-18:00, room 153
• Moodle page

Description

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.

Prerequisites

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

Learning outcomes

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

• Approach a linguistic question using methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
• Apply 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.
• Have a certain level of independence to develop their own projects for Master’s theses.