Jack DiMidio:
If you want to design a linguistics study, you must have the following things: a sound idea, competent data coders and experiment runners (who are often the same people), someone who can obtain enrichment money to pay the people you’ll be testing and to buy any necessary equipment (who also often applies to the above), a dedicated room in which to run the experiment, actual people to run the study on, a lot of patience, and lastly and most importantly the university’s permission. It seems pretty complex, and it is, but I’m here to tell you it’s possible, and I’ve seen it happen.
I’m freshman who is majoring in German and minoring in linguistics, and I worked under the study of Dr. Carrie Jackson who works both in the German department and for the Center for Language Science. I was very fortunate in the fall semester to have been enrolled in her GER 301 course—my first German course at PSU!—in which she asked me (well, the whole class really) whether any of us would want to be a RA (research assistant) in her linguistics lab. I jumped at the opportunity and I can say it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my college career.
But the experience didn’t come without its difficulties. After a testing of the first iteration of the experiment, we found that the results were not at all what we were looking for and that there was a flaw in the way we tested our participants: it was too easy to cheat the study. Such a blow could have been spirit–sinking, but no. It took a bit of rearrangement and some more testing, and not to mention a lot of really difficult work, but we had a study that was finally ready to be run.
We sent out emails to all potentially eligible students and I even personally asked some of my peers to participate. After all, they’d earn $15 for their efforts; it was like schoolwork without the pressure of getting a good grade and with the benefit of enough money for two Chipotle burritos.
Every time I ran a participant, I had to explain what each task was going to be like. This was not easy, as the tasks they had to complete were somewhat abstract and their purpose was seemingly opaque. This was intentional (the opacity) so that the participant would produce the effect we wanted them to produce. But with each participant, my speech became more regular, I didn’t have to look at my directions cheat sheet, and I learned what words were best to describe each task (without giving its intent away).
For me, working in a linguistics lab was mostly a communicative challenge (big surprise), and I learned that hard work does in fact pay off. I had to use a bit of rhetoric, a pinch of self-discipline, and a heaping tablespoon of endurance in order to form the stew of data we will now use to prove (or disprove) our hypothesis!