Project Grant 2214137

This National Science Foundation project grant award of $116,990 supports research into deconstructing wordlikeness judgments through interconnected experimental and computational studies. Funded under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075), the award will provide research training and mentoring opportunities for graduate students in modern experimental and computational methods related to phonotactic knowledge and language sciences.

Specifically, the City University of New York will conduct experimental studies manipulating response measures, stimulus modality, and response modality to elicit English and Korean speakers' wordlikeness judgments for nonce words. A variety of computational models will be assessed based on their ability to fit the experimental results. The research aims to examine how well explicit computational models perform against observed judgments, the relationship between gradence and human perception, and whether results are affected by stimulus or response modality. An open-access online database of experimental results will also be created as a resource for other language science researchers. Outreach targeting informal science education is also planned. The three-year project began in September 2022 with a total award amount of $116,990.