Experimental methods to study cultural differences in linguistics

Abstract

A relatively recent development in linguistics is the use of experimental methods in different cultural settings. It takes place within a larger trend in psychology following the observation that, up until today, research predominantly relies on North American and Northern European university students. When confronted to slightly more varied samples, the robustness of many theoretical generalizations no longer holds. Then why do we fail to see a significant rise in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic experimental research? A major hurdle comes from the fact that experimental research protocols are developed for a lab setting. This means that even when recent technological progress allows us to bring high-quality portable equipment to the field or conduct studies on the Internet, researchers still face challenges to design experiments that can work for diverse populations. This chapter offers an overview of studies that successfully overcome these hurdles and discusses future avenues for experimental research in diverse linguistic and cultural settings.