Practical Sessions

What is "the field"? It can be a remote community that takes days to reach—but it can just as easily be someone's home, a childcare center, or a classroom. Naturalistic and observational methods provide a powerful way to understand language acquisition within the complexity of children's everyday lives.

In this session, participants will explore the strengths and limitations of diverse approaches, from ethnographic methods to long-form audio recordings and other portable technologies. We will discuss ethical and practical considerations, including sampling strategies, data quality, community engagement, incorporating participant feedback, and sharing research findings. Together, we will examine how naturalistic and/or observational methods can reveal aspects of children's language environments that are often overlooked in laboratory studies, while fostering critical reflection on representation, bias, and ecological validity in developmental research.

This practical session focuses on conducting field-based experimental research. We will first briefly discuss the key differences between laboratory- and field-based research, followed by a discussion of the importance and challenges of conducting field research. The session also covers strategies for engaging local people (e.g., collaborators and research assistants), emphasizing their critical role in successful fieldwork. Participants will also learn how to select methods that are both appropriate and feasible for field conditions, address ethical considerations, and overcome practical challenges in data collection, including participant recruitment and securing suitable testing locations. The session will provide recommendations for facilitating data collection and discuss practical concerns, such as participant compensation, logistical planning, and other key considerations for conducting field-based experimental research.

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.

Transcription is an invaluable component of research in language acquisition, allowing behavioral scientists to conduct detailed analyses on the development of children's speech and the nature of their exposure to speech from others. In this tutorial, you will learn how to transcribe in CHAT, a commonly used transcription format utilized in CHILDES, the largest publicly available database of child speech corpora. After creating a basic transcription file, you will learn how to use CLAN software to begin studying the features of child language. We will discuss various applications of transcription, including language acquisition research, clinical work, and language documentation. We will also review modern computational tools to aid in transcription.

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. 

This session will provide a short, practical introduction to setting up a simple behavioral experiment using open software. We will provide detailed, step-by-step walkthrough materials for implementing a simple auditory word recognition task in either PsychoPy or jsPsych (choose your own adventure!). Both software options are openly available and no previous experience with experimental software is required. We'll use the majority of the time for students to work on implementing their own experiment, and experienced users will be on-hand to answer questions and provide hands-on support. While the main session materials are geared towards beginners, the session will also provide opportunities to learn about and work on more advanced features.

In this practical session, we focus on designing questionnaires for data collection in populations where many standardized tools require adaptation to ensure cultural and linguistic appropriateness. We will first review existing questionnaires and explore how they can be adapted for specific research environments. The session will address key methodological considerations, including developing culturally-appropriate questions and terminology, choosing suitable administration formats (e.g., self-administered or interview-style), and selecting relevant question types such as Likert scales or open-ended questions. Additionally, we will compare online and paper-based administration methods and discuss practical things to consider for different field conditions. Participants will gain practical insights for adapting and designing context-sensitive questionnaires that support reliable data collection.

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.

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.

How do we get from a table of numbers to a claim about language? This session takes one small dataset - accuracy and reaction times from a lexical decision task - and works through it from the first plot to the final sentence. We start by looking: what does a good graph show that a mean hides? We then fit a simple linear model and see that it formalises what the picture already suggested. Finally we ask what a p-value and a confidence interval can, and cannot, tell us. Participants will produce and interpret their own plot and model. No strong background in statistics or R is assumed; all code is provided and annotated.