How to join Dr. Arnold's lab
Graduate Students
UNC Chapel Hill is an ideal place to study psycholinguistics. There is a stimulating community of language researchers, with a lot of contact between graduate students and faculty from numerous programs and departments. The cognitive program includes two professors that investigate the mechanisms of language use and understanding: Jennifer Arnold and Peter Gordon. There are many other language researchers on campus, in departments that include the
linguistics department and the
division of Speech and Hearing Sciences.
If you are interested in working in Dr. Arnold's laboratory, click here for more information about the Cognitive Program in the Psychology Department and how to apply.
Undergraduate Students
If you are interested in a career in psychology, linguistics, or a related field, it is an excellent idea to get involved with research as an undergraduate.
There are two primary ways to become involved with research in my lab.
Independent Research
You can sign up to do an independent research project with me for class credit. In some cases, this may turn into an honors thesis. For more information on the independent research program, click
here
If you are interested in doing a project in my lab, contact Dr. Arnold. The usual scenario is that you do about 9 hours of work in the lab per week, in addition to doing assigned readings on the topic of your research project. At the end of the semester you write a 10-page paper about the project. You should know that in addition to the requirements imposed by the department, I usually ask students to commit to doing two consecutive semesters of research in my lab, which allows a much more in-depth experience -- as well as the chance to fully design, carry out, and analyze an experiment.
Example undergraduate independent projects in the Arnold lab:
- Alyssa Ventimiglia is currently designing an experiment to investigate how working memory load influences the way people choose their words. Previous research suggests that when people are distracted by a secondary task (e.g., remembering numbers), they are less likely to use pronouns, and instead use more explicit expressions, like a name. One quesiton is whether people do this simply because they are distracted themselves, or because they expect that their addressee is distracted too. In this study, Alyssa will manipulate whether the speaker is distracted or the addressee is distracted. The primary task will be describing pictures like "The girl has ball in the first picture, and {the girl / she} has a bat in the second picture."
- Jennifer Tait designed and ran a series of 3 experiments to test the conditions that lead speakers to simplify their pronunciation of words with consonant clusters in them. For example, the word "dentist" might sometimes be pronounced "dentis", where the cluster "st" is simplified to just "s". Other work shows that consonant clusters are reduced when the word is predictable in context, for example when the previous words tend to co-occur frequently with the target word. Jennifer showed that consonant cluster reduction also occurs when a word is repeated in discourse.
- Nate Crosby designed and ran an experiment that examined how listeners use disfluency during language comprehension. Previous work (Arnold, Hudson Kam, & Tanenhaus, 2007) found that listeners are biased toward something unfamiliar when they hear the speaker being disfluent. This is likely because the disfluency indicates that the speaker is having difficulty, and listener infer that the cause of the difficulty is the unfamiliarity of the referent. Nate's project asked whether listeners base their inferences of difficulty on their own experience, or the assumed experience of the speaker. Nate presented subjects with pictures of musical objects and medical objects. When they were told that the speaker was a musician, subjects who were also musicians demonstrated a bias toward the medical objects when they heard a disfluency (e.g., "Click on theee, uh, red..."). This effect did not occur for subjects who were not musicians, nor when subjects were told that the speaker was a medical student. This suggests that listeners are sensitive to the speaker's expertise, but their own expertise plays a role in their ability to use this information.
- Lorelle Babwah designed and ran an experiment to examine the effects of distraction on speech. In Lorelle's task, speakers gave instructions to listeners to move objects, for example "Click on the broom. Now move the broom above the house." In between the two instructions, sometimes the two participants heard a set of 1-4 beeps, and had to press a button corresponding to the number of beeps. In this "distraction" condition, speakers were less likely to use pronouns, and more likely to repeat the expression (e.g., "the broom", instead of "it").
- Jordan Todd designed a novel game to investigate what happens to speech when people are lying. Pairs of participants played an interactive game where they shared information competitively, where each player tried to be the first to acquire the "pot of gold" on the game board. We expected that lying would lead to higher pitch. However, we found the opposite -- telling the truth led to higher pitched utterances. We think this is because the "truth" condition was actually harder than the lying condition in the game, since participants had to carefully examine the location of objects on the board in order to report them truthfully. Thus, we think that the higher pitch was the result of the difficulty of the task.
Paid Research positions
Occasionally I have funds to hire paid research assistants, who assist with tasks such as these:
- preparing visual stimuli, e.g. manipulating images in Adobe Photoshop
- preparing auditory stimuli, e.g. analyzing the phonetic features of instructions in the phonetics program Praat
- running adult participants on experiments
- assisting with running child participants
- coding data
- preparing data for analysis
Frequently, paid RAs have already worked in the lab through an independent research project.
If you are eligible for Work Study, you may also work in my lab through that program. Please contact Dr. Arnold if you are interested in participating as a work study researcher.
