The purpose of each article notes assignment is for you to gain experience reading and synthesizing research articles, which are the primary method for conveying research results in the field of psycholinguistics. For each of the two article notes assignments, you will summarize a scholarly article on a psycholinguistic topic in 2-4 pages (using 12-point font). Each article notes assignment is worth 10 points: 5 points each for a rough draft and a revised final draft. For each article notes assignment, your task is to concisely write a summary entirely in your own words of a published research article in psycholinguistics. Your summary should address all of the following questions about the article.

 

• Background and Research Question (2 Points)

What is the main research question of the article? What background literature led the researchers to their question? Why does this research matter? What larger issue in cognitive science or psycholinguistics does this research bear on?

 

• Hypotheses (1 point)

What are the researchers’ predictions? Why are they predicting this? NOTE: Not every article states hypotheses explicitly, so you may need to figure this out from the context.

 

• Methods (1 point)

How are the researchers testing their hypotheses? Briefly describe the participants, task, and materials. Is there enough methodological detail so that someone else could replicate this research? Do the authors address methodological weaknesses in their own research? NOTE: If an article describes more than one experiment, and the methods differ between the experiments, you will need to describe the methods for each one.

 

• Results & Conclusions (1 point)

Describe the results. Do they support the researchers’ hypotheses? What are the implications of their results for the field of psycholinguistics? Do they have any broader implications? How does the results of this article connect to topics discussed in LING/PHIL/PSY 432?

 

Citing Your Sources

Please cite the article and any of the background literature that you choose discuss in-text, AND provide a list of references at the end of your paper. Your reference list does NOT count towards the 2-4 page limit.

An important note on summarization

Please remember that you are summarizing an article; you do not need to include every single iota of information from the article (if you did, there would be no need for a summary; one could just read the original article). Pretend that I have not read the article, and include the information I would need to understand the study. You may not use any direct quotes in your summary – it must be entirely written in your own words in order for you to receive credit. Keep in mind that even if you paraphrase in your own words, you are still required to properly cite the source. If you have any questions about what should/should not be included in a summary, please do not hesitate to contact me.

 

A note on statistics

Statistics is an important part of science, and some of these papers will include discussion of the results of a variety of statistical tests (e.g. you’ll see things like “the results of a chi-squared test for independence was significant (χ2(8) = 16.87, p < 0.05)”) which can appear intimidating to first-time readers. Do not worry. I do not expect you to have any statistical background, and you should be able to fully understand the important parts of scientific papers like these without having to understand the statistics (authors should always describe why they are doing these tests and what results they found in prose). That said, do NOT copy and paste the results of these tests, or p-values, F-values, etc., into your summary. They do not belong in a summary, and if you do this and it is clear that you do not understand what the statistics mean, I will deduct points.

 

Available articles for article notes 1 assignment:

For article notes 1, you must choose one (1) article from the following list of articles.

1. Barutchu et al. (2008) (Speech perception)
2. Pilley and Reid (2011) (Human vs. animal communication)

 

Available articles for article notes 2 assignment:

For article notes 2, you must choose one (1) article from the following list of articles.

1. Emmorey (1989) (Morphological processing)
2. Rastle, Davis, & New (2004) (Lexical processing)