Practical Sessions

Day 1

UTC+2

Conducting Field Research: Naturalistic & observational data

Camilla Scaff

UTC-4

Conducting Field Research: Experimental data

Paul Omane

Day 2

UTC+2

Research Method: Experimental data

This practical session introduces experimental research methods to participants with little or no prior background. We begin by distinguishing observational from experimental data, then guide participants through the core building blocks of experimental design: choosing a paradigm, formulating hypotheses, identifying independent and dependent variables, and deciding between within- and between-subjects designs. We also cover practical concerns such as item selection, confound removal, trial presentation, and participant exclusion criteria. Rather than lecture-only, participants work in groups to design their own mini experimental protocol, leaving with a concrete draft and a better sense of whether this kind of research fits their interests.

Eon-Suk Ko

Eon-Suk Ko is a Professor of Linguistics at Chosun University in South Korea, where she directs the Child Language Lab and the Center for Data Science in Humanities. Her research examines early language development and caregiver–child interaction, with a growing interest in computational methods that advance language acquisition research. She serves on the ManyBabies Governing Board, as Associate Editor of the Journal of Child Language, and on the Editorial Board of Infancy.

UTC-4

Data Processing: Transcribing language samples

Joseph Coffey

Day 3

UTC+2

Research Method: Naturalistic & observational data

In this practical session, participants will work through the key decisions involved in planning an observational, naturalistic corpus study of language acquisition. After a brief introduction to the differences between observational and experimental data and how they can be used to both answer and ask questions about language acquisition, we will discuss how to choose between daylong and short-form recordings, longitudinal and cross-sectional designs, and fully naturalistic or semi-structured recording contexts.

Participants will consider practical aspects of study design, including participant age, sample size, potential exclusion criteria, and recording equipment, using real-world examples and guided discussion. The session is intended to support informed methodological choices during the planning stage of a corpus study but also to think about how to integrate and use or extend existing data.

Jekaterina Mazara

Jekaterina Mazara is a psycholinguist focusing on child language acquisition in typologically diverse languages. In her research, she primarily uses naturalistic corpora and focuses on communicative development between the ages of 9 months and 6 years of age. She studies a variety of phenomena, from the combination of gestures and speech in early communicative acts to language mixing across developmental stages. Currently, she’s an assistant professor (Akademische Rätin auf Zeit) at the University of Tübingen. She completed her PhD and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zurich in the ACQDIV lab (Language, ACQuisition, DIVersity). She’s coordinated and helped collect a longitudinal corpus of 6 children between 2;0 and 4;0 learning Tuatschin (a Romansh language spoken in Switzerland) in mono- and bilingual settings.

UTC-4

Data Collection: Running an experiment using jsPsych

Martin Zettersten

Day 4

UTC+2

Data Analysis: Analyzing Language Transcripts

This session will focus on analyzing corpus data for writing an acquisition sketch, following the guidelines of the Acquisition Sketch Project (Defina et al. 2023). We will cover the Sketch Acquisition Manual's key areas of focus for the different linguistic levels, highlighting one or two questions for each level. For example, for phonology we will highlight the phoneme inventory. For lexicon and semantics, we will check if nursery vocabulary is used and look at how to classify lexical items according to the semantic groupings used in the Macarthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. For morphosyntax, we will calculate the mean length of utterance. For syntax, we will determine the most common word order. Students should leave with a better understanding of how to concretely approach writing an acquisition sketch.

Shanley Allen

Shanley Allen is Professor of Psycholinguistics and Language Development at RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau (Germany). She has published extensively on the acquisition and processing of morphosyntax and information structure in monolingual and bilingual children and adults, especially the under-represented language Inuktitut. She is Co-Initiator of the Acquisition Sketch Project, Co-Editor of the book series Trends in Language Acquisition Research, on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Child Language, and President of the International Association for the Study of Child Language.

UTC-4

Data Collection: Questionnaires

Grace Ennim

Day 5

UTC+2

Data Processing: Data Preprocessing with RStudio and tidyverse

This hands-on tutorial introduces the basics of data preprocessing in R using RStudio and the tidyverse. We will focus on the practical steps that usually come before statistical analysis: loading packages, reading data into R, inspecting data frames, selecting relevant variables, filtering observations, creating new variables, and producing simple descriptive summaries. The session combines short explanations with guided coding exercises, so participants can practise each step and discuss their answers as we go. The goal is to give participants a usable foundation for preparing simple datasets for analysis and for understanding the logic behind common tidyverse data-wrangling workflows.

Jens Roeser

Jens Roeser is an Associate Professor in Psycholinguistics in the Department of Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. His research focuses on language production, especially written language production, and uses methods including Bayesian modelling, keystroke logging, and eye tracking. He teaches statistics and R, cognitive psychology, and language acquisition.

UTC-4

Data Analysis: Analysing Data using R

Giulia Calignano

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