Experimental Linguistics in the Field – Special Issues and Overview Articles in 2015

In recent years, more and more psycholinguists and experimental linguists have gone beyond the limited set of well-researched languages or they have left their labs to collect spontaneous speech data or experimental data in fieldwork contexts. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that in 2015, at least two special issues of journals have had a focus on psycholinguistics in the field:

First Language, 35 (4-5): Indigenous children’s language: Acquisition, preservation and evolution of language in minority contexts

Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 9: Laboratory in the Field: Advances in cross-linguistic psycholinguistics.

These special issues have introductory articles that give an overview of current research topics, field-appropriate methods, or theoretical issues that require widening the set of languages, research settings, and methodologies for experimental linguistics. These issues have also been addressed in another overview article in 2015:

Whalen, D. H., & McDonough, J. (2015). Taking the Laboratory into the Field. Annual Review of Linguistics, 1(1), 395-415.

We in Essex have continued and extended our psycholinguistic work on previously under-researched languages as our ExperimentalFieldLinguistics resource site and the following studies demonstrate:

Kgolo, N., & Eisenbeiss, S. (2015). The role of morphological structure in the processing of complex forms: Evidence from Setswana deverbative nouns. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 9, .1116-1133

Kula, N. & Braun, B. (2015). Mental representation of tonal spreading in Bemba: Evidence from elicited production and perception. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 33.3: 307-323.

Results of cross-linguistic studies in recent years can also be found in my recent handbook article:

Eisenbeiss, S. (2015). Syntax and Language Acquisition. In T. Kiss and A. Alexiadou (Eds.), Syntax: an international handbook (2nd edition) (pp. 1792-1832). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (pre-print downloadable: http://www.academia.edu/1220666/Syntax_and_Language_Acquisition)