Psycholinguistic Methods

Abstract

Psycholinguistic methods provide insights into the mental representation of language. In the first part of this chapter, we discuss common psycholinguistic tasks and measures together with their strengths and limitations. We review traditional behavioral measures such as response time as well as newer measures, including eye-tracking and event-related potentials. In the second part of the chapter, we discuss the major experimental paradigms that are employed with psycholinguistic tasks and measures and consider the research conducted with these paradigms. We review classic priming paradigms as well as state-of-the-art paradigms that are particularly useful for applied linguistics research, such as artificial linguistic systems. Finally, we consider future directions in applied linguistics research using psycholinguistic methodologies.