100 Psycholinguistics Project Ideas

Here’s a list of 100 psycholinguistics project ideas for beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, covering a variety of research styles, from experiments and corpus analysis to computational modeling and applied psycholinguistics.

Beginner Projects (1–33)

These focus on observation, basic analysis, surveys, and small experiments. Great for building foundational skills.

Language Development & Acquisition

  1. Observe language development in toddlers vs. older kids.
  2. Compare vocabulary size between bilingual and monolingual children.
  3. Study baby talk (infant-directed speech) and its features.
  4. Document first words across different cultures/languages.
  5. Survey parents on child language milestones.

Cognition & Comprehension

  1. Reaction times for reading simple vs. complex sentences.
  2. Memory recall for emotionally charged vs. neutral words.
  3. Stroop test with color and emotion words.
  4. Study word length vs. reading speed.
  5. How punctuation affects sentence comprehension.

Language & Social Context

  1. Analyze how people shift their speech in formal vs. informal settings.
  2. Survey people’s attitudes towards accents.
  3. Code-switching behavior in multilingual speakers.
  4. Gendered language use in conversation.
  5. Politeness strategies in different age groups.

Experiments & Mini Studies

  1. Priming effect using related/unrelated words.
  2. Reaction to grammar errors in written texts.
  3. Eye movement while reading ambiguous sentences.
  4. Sentence vs. word list memory.
  5. Impact of emojis on interpreting tone in messages.

Corpus/Media Analysis

  1. Analyze speech errors in TV interviews.
  2. Study filler word usage in casual speech.
  3. Examine metaphors in political speeches.
  4. Explore gestures accompanying speech in videos.
  5. Look at lexical diversity in spoken vs. written language.

Surveys & Questionnaires

  1. Create a questionnaire on language attitudes.
  2. Survey reading habits and comprehension.
  3. Study slang usage by age group.
  4. Survey second-language learner difficulties.
  5. Vocabulary guessing in unfamiliar contexts.

Miscellaneous

  1. Document tongue twister difficulty levels.
  2. Reaction times to rhyming vs. non-rhyming words.
  3. Create a mini psycholinguistic glossary.

Intermediate Projects (34–66)

These involve more structure, hypothesis testing, or multiple variables.

Language Processing & Comprehension

  1. Eye-tracking experiment: passive vs. active sentence processing.
  2. Sentence parsing using garden path sentences.
  3. Study ambiguity resolution using homonyms.
  4. Explore semantic priming in bilinguals.
  5. Gender bias in pronoun resolution.

Speech Production

  1. Analyze spoonerisms in speech.
  2. Reaction time for naming pictures in L1 vs. L2.
  3. Lexical retrieval speed in younger vs. older adults.
  4. Study pausing patterns in spontaneous speech.
  5. Observe repair strategies after speech errors.

Memory & Learning

  1. Impact of spaced repetition on vocabulary retention.
  2. Study semantic vs. phonological memory interference.
  3. Compare recall of abstract vs. concrete words.
  4. Examine the effects of background noise on word learning.
  5. Serial position effects in sentence recall.

Neuro/Cognitive Linguistics

  1. fNIRS or EEG study (if equipment is available) of reading words vs. nonwords.
  2. Stroop test with multilingual speakers.
  3. Investigate working memory and syntactic complexity.
  4. Right vs. left hemisphere processing of metaphors (theoretical).
  5. Simulate aphasia using a word-finding game.

Multilingualism

  1. Code-switching triggers in bilingual speech.
  2. Cognitive control in bilinguals vs. monolinguals.
  3. Analyze language mixing in children of immigrants.
  4. Compare translation accuracy in humans vs. AI.
  5. Pronunciation variation in multilingual environments.

AI/Computational Language

  1. Compare human reaction time vs. GPT output for sentence prediction.
  2. Use a chatbot to test understanding of sarcasm.
  3. Measure semantic similarity using embedding models vs. human judgment.
  4. Create a basic chatbot to model error correction.
  5. Explore NLP bias in word embeddings.

Applied Psycholinguistics

  1. Language and emotion recognition in children with autism.
  2. Reading comprehension differences in dyslexic vs. non-dyslexic students.
  3. Analyze reading time with or without audio support.

Advanced Projects (67–100)

These require deeper theory, experimental design, modeling, or statistical analysis.

Language & Brain

  1. ERP analysis of semantic violations (if using EEG data).
  2. Simulate Broca’s vs. Wernicke’s aphasia using computational models.
  3. Cross-modal priming with auditory and visual stimuli.
  4. Examine neural activation patterns for bilingual processing.
  5. Working memory load and syntactic parsing (eye-tracking/fMRI study).

Computational Psycholinguistics

  1. Build a simple neural network to simulate word learning.
  2. Compare BERT predictions to human cloze test results.
  3. Create a model of sentence processing using ACT-R.
  4. Train a model to identify code-switch points.
  5. Compare GPT-4 to human paraphrasing abilities.

Speech & Cognition

  1. Analyze prosody’s effect on sentence comprehension.
  2. Study real-time processing of irony vs. literal meaning.
  3. Examine lexical access in aphasic speech using error analysis.
  4. Investigate morphological processing in agglutinative vs. fusional languages.

Language Development

  1. Longitudinal study of L2 learners’ fluency development.
  2. Investigate language acquisition in homes with multiple languages.
  3. Role of gesture in first-language acquisition.
  4. Test theory of mind via language understanding in children.

Experimental Linguistics

  1. Explore constraint-based vs. syntax-first sentence processing.
  2. Study embedded clause processing difficulty across languages.
  3. Lexical prediction in native vs. non-native speakers.
  4. Study the influence of discourse context on anaphora resolution.

Cross-linguistic & Cultural

  1. Analyze idiom processing across languages.
  2. Semantic category learning in different cultures.
  3. Universal vs. language-specific metaphors.
  4. Cognate recognition in trilinguals.
  5. Cross-linguistic sentence acceptability judgments.

Statistical / Data-Heavy Projects

  1. Corpus analysis of syntactic complexity in news vs. social media.
  2. Cluster analysis of lexical similarity in multilingual dictionaries.
  3. Topic modeling for psycholinguistic themes in research abstracts.
  4. Use large-scale survey to correlate SES and language exposure.
  5. Bayesian modeling of lexical access.

Interdisciplinary / Innovative

  1. Use VR to test spatial language comprehension.
  2. Combine EEG with NLP model outputs to test human-AI alignment in sentence processing.

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