Collecting Psycholinguistic Response Time Data Using Amazon Mechanical Turk

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dc.contributor.authorEnochson, Kelly
dc.contributor.authorCulbertson, Jennifer
dc.date.accessioned2015-09-23T15:47:19Z
dc.date.available2015-09-23T15:47:19Z
dc.date.issued2015-03-30
dc.description.abstractResearchers in linguistics and related fields have recently begun exploiting online crowd-sourcing tools, like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), to gather behavioral data. While this method has been successfully validated for various offline measures—grammaticality judgment or other forced-choice tasks—its use for mainstream psycholinguistic research remains limited. This is because psycholinguistic effects are often dependent on relatively small differences in response times, and there remains some doubt as to whether precise timing measurements can be gathered over the web. Here we show that three classic psycholinguistic effects can in fact be replicated using AMT in combination with open-source software for gathering response times client-side. Specifically, we find reliable effects of subject definiteness, filler-gap dependency processing, and agreement attraction in self-paced reading tasks using approximately the same numbers of participants and/or trials as similar laboratory studies. Our results suggest that psycholinguists can and should be taking advantage of AMT and similar online crowd-sourcing marketplaces as a fast, low-resource alternative to traditional laboratory research.
dc.description.sponsorshipPublication of this article was funded in part by the George Mason University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund
dc.identifier.citationEnochson K, Culbertson J (2015) Collecting Psycholinguistic Response Time Data Using Amazon Mechanical Turk. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0116946. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0116946
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116946
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1920/9905
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherPublic Library of Science
dc.relation.hasparthttp://hdl.handle.net/1920/9116
dc.rightsAttribution 3.0 United States
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/
dc.subjectPsycholinguistics

dc.subjectReplication studies

dc.subjectResearch laboratories

dc.subjectAttention

dc.subjectComputer software

dc.subjectComputing methods
dc.subjectResearch validity

dc.subjectUndergraduates
dc.titleCollecting Psycholinguistic Response Time Data Using Amazon Mechanical Turk
dc.typeArticle

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