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For a linguistics class of mine, I need to replicate a peer-reviewed linguistics study. I want to find something interesting, though my resources are extremely limited. I have a considerable supply of potential participants, however. Aspects of the study can be simplified to accommodate my financial limits, though the basic structure and goal should remain more or less intact. Thanks for any help you can offer. Participants will speak English, though I have a wide access to Spanish and Japanese speakers as well.

I'm particularly interested in UG, if anyone knows of anything specifically pertaining to that.

Lysander Cox
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  • This type of open-ended question isn't really suited for the SE format, and in addition, you probably want to tell us the demongraphics of your participants (particularly the languages they speak). – WavesWashSands Oct 08 '19 at 06:50
  • One that might awe a few of them could be predicting the gender of the author of an anonymous text... which they could write :) Not very UG, though – Luke Sawczak Oct 08 '19 at 08:05
  • You could also have them track their own and others' speech errors in a few well-defined categories – some that you would expect in some framework and some that would be unexpected given basic UG principles. Could be interesting... – Luke Sawczak Oct 08 '19 at 08:31
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    Observing Zipf's law. – Adam Bittlingmayer Oct 08 '19 at 17:45
  • Seconding Zipf's law. – Draconis Oct 08 '19 at 17:46
  • Try searching for phonosemantics in English monosyllables; the assonances (like initial kl-) and the rimes (like final -ump) are often very coherent semantically. In fact, they form a sort of jackleg classifier system. Lots of data available and cool things to discover -- more details in this zipfile, including papers, software, data files, and preliminary analyses. – jlawler Oct 08 '19 at 19:33

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If you know how and can get say 5 speakers each, you could compare F1 and F2 of Japanese and Spanish, to see if the vowels are "the same". This does relate to UG in that it raises the question whether [i e a o u] refer to the same physical thing across languages. Expect Japanese and Spanish [u] to be different. You would want to come up with comparable stimuli for both languages, like "dama". You may have to look for separate studies of Japanese and Spanish – I don't know of any study that specifically pools Japanese and Spanish and tests "language" as a factor.

user6726
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