Laboratory of the Aurora Center for Language Acquisition, Variation, and Attrition
AcqVA Lab

Resources

This webpage provides links & resources for researchers relating to general research design issues, as well as data acquisition, processing, visualization, and analysis.

Lab equipment booking

In order to book the equipment in the AcqVA and PoLaR lab, follow these steps:
1. Take a look at the equipment overview sheet to see if the equipment is available.
2. Contact the person responsible for the equipment (Serge or Vince) to discuss training, prioritising, and scheduling.
3. After agreeing on booking, contact Cynthia (cynthia.g.palmeros@uit.no) or Sergey (sergey.minor@uit.no) to add you to the booking overview.

Sikt approval

Sikt is the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. All projects that involve processing of personal data (names, emails, IP addresses, etc.) at any stage must be approved by Sikt. To apply for approval you need to fill out and submit a notification form on Sikt’s website. Sikt also regulates the information that must be provided to participants in any experiment. Download the Sikt template for information and consent forms here.

Annikken Steinbakk is UiT’s Data protection officer (personvernombud). Here you can download slides from former data protection officer Joakim Bakkevold’s presentation on data protection and NSD approval for research projects (UiT account needed).

Experimental design & programming

We use a host of tools for designing experiments including OpenSesame, jsPsych (esp. for experiments hosted online on our JATOS server), Gorilla and, more recently,  E-Prime.

We have also used proprietary software packages provided with our infrared eye-trackers: SMI Experiment Center (download manual here) and EyeLink Experiment Builder (site and video tutorials).

  • Access Björn’s video tutorial on experiment design in OpenSesame here.
  • Here you will find sets of stimuli shared by members of our group.
Specialised lab equipment

If you want to use any of the available lab equipment please get in touch with us.

Web-based experiments

There are several options for safely running experiments on the web. If you have a simple experimental design (e.g. a survey, vocabulary test, etc.) consider using Nettskjema. This is a simple and secure solution developed by the University of Oslo.

For more complex designs, we recommend the following solutions:

  • We have access to a JATOS server based at UiT and specialised for hosting online experiments. It is currently in test phase, however we have had very positive experience using it for large-scale online studies, including web-based eye-tracking. If you want help setting up your experiment using JATOS please contact Serge.
  • We have a lab subscription to Gorilla, which combines experimental design functionality and online hosting. If you are an AcqVA researcher and you want to make use of the lab subscription please contact Natalia or Serge.
Recruiting participants for online experiments

Prolific is a platform for recruiting participants for online surveys and experiments that adheres to the European privacy and data protection regulations (GDPR). The pool of participants is primarily English-speaking, but not exclusively. It can be used in combination with both JATOS (instructions) and Gorilla (see instructions here and here). For short instructions on how to transfer money from your project to you Prolific account, click here.

Data storage

UiT researchers can use SharePoint and OneDrive (accessible via Office 365) for data storage. UiT recommends SharePoint for storing research data and OneDrive for personal storage (all the data on OneDrive is automatically deleted when a person leaves the institution). More information can be obtained at UiT’s Research Data Portal.

Data analysis

Most of the researchers in the lab use R for data analysis. Here you can access video recordings of Bodo Winter’s course on Statistical Modeling for Linguists focusing on (generalized) linear models (taught at UiT, June 2021), and here you will find all the materials for the course. We also recommend Bodo’s book on the same topic.

This is a short non-technical introduction to Bayesian mixed effects models (by Michael Franke and Timo Roettger).

For the analysis of Visual World eye-tracking data, access Serge’s introduction to the cluster-based based permutation analysis here, and find his presentation on the analysis of effect latencies in VW eye-tracking here.

Data visualization
  • Tutorial on data visualization in R written by Martin.
  • Tuturial on how to use the esquisse add-in in RStudio to visualize your data by Björn.
Open data

To make research data and code openly available, researchers can use domain-general repositories such as OSF, or UiT’s institutional repository for open research data. Click here for a registry of data repositories.

You can also use the AcqVA Aurora Collection (https://dataverse.no/dataverse/acqva) in TROLLing (The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics), which is a specialized repository for linguistic data. The advantage of TROLLing is that it is curated by data experts who will ensure that your dataset meets all the industry standards, making it potentially more accessible and reusable (deposit guidelines).

Here you can download a video and pdf tutorial on using TROLLing (by Helene N. Andreassen and Leif Longva).

Lab resources

The GitHub repo contains materials and resources for our workshops and events.

Check out our YouTube channel  on which we post videos of our research, instructions on how to use equipment, or how to perform certain tasks or analyses.

Workshop materials
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