Dates to remember:

Tues., April 8^th – Final project proposal due

Tues., May 13^th – Final project write-up due

In this class, we have taken what we know about the representations involved in speech perception from phonology and asked, how are these representations learned, stored, and accessed during online speech perception? We have looked at a number of different experimental methodologies that have been used to get at these questions.

For your final project, we want you to take a specific question about speech perception that interests you and propose a way to test it. Did you think that one of the previous articles was examining an interesting question but their experimental logic was flawed? Did a previous result get you thinking about an interesting follow-up experiment? Or, is there a separate question about speech perception that you have thought about before, and one of the articles give you an idea about how you could address it experimentally? Since you’ll need to go through the background literature in your proposal, you should pick a topic that you’ll be interested in reading and thinking about.

On April 8^th, we are asking that you turn in a proposal describing the topic and question you’d like to focus on. This proposal will make up 10% of your final project grade. The proposal should be about a page long, and should include 2 or 3 references in addition to ones we have covered in class.

The write-up itself is due by 9:30 AM on May 13^th, the last day of class. The write-up should be in the format of a journal article, with everything except results. In particular, the paper should include:

- Introduction: several paragraphs describing the problem at a big picture level and how you are going to approach it

- Background: a good literature review (~5 pages) of previous work related to your idea

- Design: describe logic of experiment, number of conditions, etc.

- Materials: describe the materials, how they will be created, whether there are certain factors that you need to control for across conditions (e.g. frequency), give examples

- Procedure: describe the procedure for running a subject in your experiment

- Predictions: Given your hypothesis, describe, specifically, what your predictions for the data are

- Conclusions: describe what you could conclude depending which way your results come out (i.e., if you find what you predict, what can you conclude?; if you find the opposite, what can you conclude?)

- Follow-up: suggest one or two follow-up experiments that you could imagine in light of what you would predict to find

Your grade will reflect not the length of the paper so much as how well you fulfill all these parts, but you should be in the neighborhood of 8-12 pages.

Be sure to communicate with us if you run into trouble along the way! As always with this kind of project, starting the lit review early is a good idea so you have time to ask for help if you have difficulty finding the relevant articles.