Introduction to Experimental Linguistics

4Offline Methods for Studying Language Comprehension

In this chapter, we begin with the presentation of experimental methods which can be applied to the study of comprehension, while focusing on so-called offline methods. These methods are typically used for observing the result of the comprehension process once it has been achieved, but do not provide access to the comprehension process itself; this is why they are called offline methods. We first discuss what are known as explicit tasks, where participants are asked to consciously assess certain aspects of the language, or certain linguistic stimuli. We then describe so-called implicit tasks which assess the comprehension process indirectly. As we see throughout this chapter, the distinction between explicit and implicit tasks appears more as a continuum rather than as two clearly distinct categories. Since language comprehension covers a broad range of processes, from word recognition to discourse comprehension, we won’t deal with each of these areas in particular. Instead, we make a general presentation of the different types of tasks that can be implemented and illustrate them with the help of studies devoted to these different fields. We also see that it is possible to use different techniques in parallel in order to collect indicators which signal complementary comprehension processes.

4.1. Explicit tasks

In an explicit task, participants must consciously use their language skills to judge stimuli, such as the grammaticality ...