Day 1 - November 7

This talk explores the field-based aspects of my research on under-studied and endangered languages conducted in Taiwan and Tonga. I will describe the experimental methodologies employed, including ethnographic approaches and participant observation, designed to address the specific challenges of working with speakers of these languages. The presentation will compare these methods with those applied to more widely spoken languages such as Japanese, highlighting the unique challenges and adaptations needed for studying endangered and under-researched languages. Finally, I will demonstrate how research on structurally diverse languages enhances our understanding of language processing and cognitive diversity.

Objectives: The presentation will focus on collecting psycholinguistic data from understudied populations through the internet. The main aims are to 1) describe the kinds of data that can be collected using web-based experiments, 2) identify the populations which can be tested using these methods, 3) explain the requirements and challenges of running unsupervised experiments through the internet, and 4) discuss potential solutions to these challenges. 

With the development of globalization and the mobility of academics, there is an opportunity for partnership between an indigenous and non-indigenous researchers conducting various field linguistic projects in collaboration with specific communities. Employing Truku Seediq as an example, the purpose of this talk is to explore the potential and challenges of being an insider researcher in her own community. Based on the participatory observations from 2012 till present, I provide some insights as well as limitations and difficulties for researchers carrying out collaborative linguistic research in intercultural settings as an insider. It is also emphasized that reflexivity, and an adaptive, decolonized approach need to be embedded throughout the research processes to ensure cultural and professional integrity in field linguistic projects. 

Conducting field psycholinguistic research implies moving the laboratory setting to communities where the language is spoken. Despite providing new valuable opportunities, this change from traditional psycholinguistic studies also involves a number of challenges at every step: conceptualization of the study, preparation of the experimental material, data collection, and data interpretation. The way we apprehend these obstacles and how we deal with them may greatly depend on the investigators themselves. In this talk, focusing on Formosan languages, I will present the specific challenges we are faced when conducting psycholinguistic research with speakers of communities we do not belong to at each step of the investigation, as well as the solution we can come up with to smoothly run psycholinguistic experiments on the field as an outsider.

Modern technology has brought advances to the study of language, and the use of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to track the moment-to-moment changes in brain activity has been ongoing for over four decades. In this talk, I will introduce the fundamentals of the ERP method and outline its advantages and disadvantages, comparing them with those of other common techniques in language research. I will also explain how to design and set up an ERP experiment, covering aspects from experimental design to data collection, and provide examples from my lab to demonstrate data interpretation.

I will present the methodological peculiarities when conducting neurolinguistic experiments on the field, and in particular EEG experiments, from the design of the study and the experimental material, the recruitment of the participants, the data collection on the field, as well as the considerations to take into account when analyzing and interpreting the data.