Psycholinguistics Laboratory

The Psycholinguistics/Neurolinguistics Lab is equipped for research and teaching in a variety of experimental and corpus-based techniques. Numerous computers allow access to such resources as:

• The UCLA Speech Error Corpus (UCLASEC), a computer database of more than 5,000 speech errors in English, French, Italian, and other languages, from normal and aphasic individuals. The corpus is constantly expanding as new errors are collected and researchers from around the world send in errors to be entered;
• The CHILDES database, a large public-domain collection of transcripts of naturalistic speech of children acquiring a large variety of languages, both normal and impaired, crosslinguistic data from acquired aphasia, and sophisticated software for automatically extracting information from these transcripts;
• The Penn Treebank, a collection of parsed corpora of written English that is searchable according to tree structures;
• Several very large unparsed corpora and word lists of English and numerous other languages, as well as word frequency lists (e.g. CELEX) and other material useful for constructing experimental stimuli;
• Software for constructing various sorts of reaction-time experiments.

The lab also has space for conducting interviews and naturalistic experiments, toys for use with children, and facilities to allow easy transcription of audio tapes of linguistic interactions with subjects, including a TEAC graphic equalizer for enhancing and filtering recorded speech. The lab is also participating in interdisciplinary projects with the departments of Psychology, Neurology, the Neuropsychiatric Institute, the Brain Research Institute, Radiology, and the Brain Mapping Institute, and as such has access to PET, MRI, and fFMRI laboratories and their equipment for carrying out research.

The Psycholinguistics Laboratory is located in 2210 Campbell Hall.