A squib is a term used in linguistics, that refers to a short, concise paper that responds to a particularly interesting and unanswered question related to language. For your squib, students will select one theory of language development from the course and create a faux experiment that would falsify (i.e. argue for or against) a particular theory of language development that you learned about in the course. In your experiment, you will need to create i) a research question, ii) a testable hypothesis, iii) a set of theoretical stimuli (either a sample, or a description of a possible sample), and you will need to discuss iv) theoretically possible and impossible results from the study, and v) implications of how your study would contribute to a deeper understanding of language development, via falsification of a theory from class. Your paper should be written in a standard IMRaD (Intro, Methods, (expected) Results, Discussion) format and should be ~2000 words in length. You must use at least 2 sources from the course material, and you must use 1 source from outside the course material
For this study, the theoretical framework Id like to use is Prosodic Bootstrapping. Attatched are the two class materials that will help with this.
