1.2.2 Design your experiment

According to the grammatical rules and your corpus-data analysis you will also have to name restrictions for the grammatical phenomenon you are doing your research on, before you test the conditions under which the grammatical item under investigation shows variability. Therefore, you need to design an experimental setting that tests exactly the items you are going to test. Your study will help you find out whether the restrictions and variations of the grammatical phenomenon you found in your first data analysis occur categorically or non-categorically, i.e. systematically or unsystematically. The material for the experimental setting must be created with the help of so-called paradigmlike token sets to guarantee your study’s validity. Within the framework of the experiment design you will elaborate a questionnaire for informants containing both the linguistic items you are going to test and fillers that function as distractors to counterbalance your questionnaire. This will prevent your informants from making implicit hypotheses about what you are testing them for. As you will see in the example study, certain rules and precautions will have to be met when it comes to the designing of an experimental setting. The issue of careful stimulus design is of particular importance for the interpretation of linguistic Magnitude Estimation studies.

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