Lab 2.14 - Reading and Inferences

Instructions for lab report

The lab report should be a complete APA style paper for the experiment you did in the lab. Include the table and figure from the MEL workbook as Table 1 and Figure 1 (etc.) in your lab report.

The DV for this assignment should be reading time for the target sentences (rt). Be sure to state in your introduction what the predictions were (based on previous research on these types of inferences). For each prediction, state whether it was confirmed, and present the statistics that support that statement. Also report all other main effects and interactions and whether they were significant.

Also report the results using accuracy on the contradiction detection task (ac) as the DV. The purpose for analyzing the accuracy data is just to make sure that there are no speed-accuracy trade-offs that would undermine your explanation of the reading time data. You do not have to specify what the predictions were for the accuracy analysis; just note whether there were any main effects and interactions, and if there are, note whether they indicate a speed-accuracy trade-off.

The following files are available on the web for you to use in the assignment.

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The file for analysis is "lab2_14-data.txt" and is on the web (condor.depaul.edu/~dallbrit) under "labs" on the course syllabus.

The data file has one line per subject. Rt1-rt4 are the reading times, arranged in following order:

verbtype: 1=direct 2=indirect

lag: 1=0 sentences between the target sentence and the preceding sentence the inference referred to, 2=2 sentences between.

The next 4 data points, ac1-ac4, are the mean accuracy rates (blrspac) again in the same order as in the first file (V1L1, V1L2, V2L1, V2L2)

There is also a file with the group means: lab2_14-tables.txt

You should use the data in this table to complete the graphs and tables in the MEL Lab workbook.