New Experiment: Collecting Fancy Art

Over the last few years, we've run a lot of experiments online at GamesWithWords.org, resulting so far in four publications, with a number of others currently under review at various journals. Most of these have experiments have focused on how people process and interpret language. I just posted a new experiment (Collecting Fancy Art) that is more squarely focused on learning language. Language learning experiments are somewhat tricky to do online, since they tend to take longer than the 5-10 minute format of online experiments, but they are important.

One of the most salient truths about language is that language has to be learned. This is clearly pretty hard, or other animals would be able to do it and we'd already have computers that were pretty good at language. But just how the learning process happens is a bit of a mystery, partly because language is a complex, interconnected system. When you learn one word, it affects how you use other words.

In this experiment, you will simultaneously learn the meanings of three different words. We're interested in seeing how your understanding of these words develops. As always, you'll learn more about the experiment at the end. And check back here in the future: After the experiment is completed, the results will be posted here.

The experiment is called "Collecting Fancy Art". You can find it here.