Online experiments for language scientists

*Please note that this tutorial will be presented online only. We will provide a lecture hall for in-person conference attendees to participate in the session.

Many areas in the language sciences rely on collecting data from human participants, from grammaticality judgments to behavioural responses (key presses, mouse clicks, spoken responses). While data collection traditionally takes place face-to-face, recent years have seen an explosion in the use of online data collection: participants take part remotely, providing responses through a survey tool or custom experimental software running in their web browser, with surveys or experiments often being advertised on crowdsourcing websites like Prolific or Amazon Mechanical Turk. Online methods potentially allow rapid and low-effort collection of large samples, and are particularly useful in situations where face-to-face data collection is not possible (e.g. during a pandemic); however, building and running these experiments poses challenges that differ from lab-based methods. In this tutorial I’ll provide a very brief introduction to online data collection. We’ll look at the main platforms for reaching paid participants, discuss some of the challenges around data quality and the ethics of running on those platforms, and take a lightning tour of javascript and jsPsych as a simple but flexible platform for building online experiments; I’ll use examples from my more extensive materials on programming online experiments (e.g. at https://kennysmithed.github.io/oels2023/) so anyone who is interested in learning more and building their own online experiments can work with those materials.