32.45, Software: New Toolkit for Psycholinguistic Experiments using Instant Messaging

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-45. Tue Jan 05 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.45, Software: New Toolkit for Psycholinguistic Experiments using Instant Messaging

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Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:23:13
From: Gregory Mills [g.j.mills at rug.nl]
Subject: New Toolkit for Psycholinguistic Experiments using Instant Messaging

 
Dear colleagues,

We have just released a toolkit for running controlled psycholinguistic
experiments using instant messaging.

The toolkit runs as a bot on the Telegram network. Participants connect to the
toolkit using the Telegram app on their mobile phones. Since all messages
between participants are mediated via the toolkit, data is instantly available
for analysis - there is no need for participants to send in their data. The
toolkit allows high levels of experimental control: participants can be
dynamically assigned to different groups, and experimental instructions (e.g.
images, texts, questionnaires) can be sent automatically by the toolkit to the
participants in their chat window.

The toolkit also supports fine-grained manipulations of the content and timing
of participant’s turns.  For example, experimental interventions can be
scripted that automatically substitute key words and phrases in participants´
turns. Interventions can also be scripted that insert “spoof” turns into the
dialogue. These spoof turns appear to participants as originating from each
other, while they have in fact been created and sent by the server. These
techniques allow the direct testing of hypotheses about how participants will
respond to specific types of prompts at different moments in the interaction.

In addition to Telegram-based chat, the toolkit provides customizable chat
interfaces that run on participants’ PCs (Windows, Apple, Linux). Among other
features these interfaces can be set to display each character as it is typed,
for investigating incremental language processing in dialogue.

The toolkit is open-source and is downloadable at:

http://cogsci.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/diet/

Best,

Gregory Mills
g.j.mills at rug.nl


Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Computational Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Morphology
                     Pragmatics
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Semantics
                     Syntax
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics



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