LING499A PRESENTATION GUIDELINES

- Should plan for it to be about 40-45 minutes long, including discussion

- Make sure to meet with Phil & Ellen sometime before day of presentation to discuss the content of the presentation

- You do not need to write a reaction the day of the presentation

- We will send you the reactions we receive from your classmates when they arrive early enough!

When you read the paper, try to notice the parts that were confusing to you at first--chances are that if they were confusing to you, they will be to others as well. Then during your presentation you can spend a little time making those parts extra clear--pictures and arrows always help.

Among other stuff, make sure you cover the following:

- What is the hypothesis the authors are testing?

- Why does this hypothesis need to be tested?

- e.g., Isn't this hypothesis just common sense? Didn't we already learn that from work in linguistics, or from a previous experiment? Why are they spending our tax dollars on this?? Try to present a compelling answer to these kinds of questions from the authors' point of view

- Is there an opposing view that they are arguing against? What is the view and who is holding it? (show us some pictures if possible; making it out to be a personal argument always makes it a little more memorable ; )

- How did the experiment work:

- Why did they choose this particular methodology?

- What were the interesting properties of the stimuli?

- What were the results? (show pictures!)

- What kind of big picture conclusions do they draw from these results?

- Do these results inspire future research in interesting directions?

- Are there any problems with their methods or conclusions?

- What do you think their opponents would say? e.g., is this so completely compelling that they would have to give up and admit defeat, or are there problem areas that they could attack?