Storyboards

The exploration of self-talk comes with methodological problems. Existing methodologies typically rely on self-reports which measures the frequency of self-talk and its correlation with any of the attested functions of self-talk. However, this does not allow us to test for specific linguistic properties. For the purpose of SELFLING, we rely on native speakers' ability to judge the well-formedness and/or appropriateness of an utterance in a given context. Specifically, we make use of the story board methodology (Burton and Matthewson’s (2015). It consists of presenting the consultant with cartoonlike pictures that minimally include a panel depicting the context of the utterance and a speech bubble for the interlocutor whose utterance is under investigation. The utterance may be presented within this speech bubble for a well-formedness judgment, or else the consultant may be asked to provide an appropriate utterance given the relevant context. 

On this page, we will make our conversation boards available, so our tests can be replicated by other researchers and in other languages.