12.2 Grill the Guest

Students' scientific critical thinking skills are put to the test by evaluating a recent scientific study by a faculty member and "grilling" them on whether each of the concepts in this course has been carefully considered.

The Lesson in Context

This is the first of several lessons involving guests. We typically invite a social scientist to share a recent published study of theirs, to be read by students ahead of time and discussed in groups during section. Questions and comments generated during the section will then be collected, a few of which will be posed to the guest during the live plenary. Students are encouraged to base their questions on particular course concepts introduced thus far.

We have a different guest and paper every year. So, the substance of this lesson can change quite substantially. Much of what's written here is an example based on what was used in UC Berkeley's Spring 2023 iteration of the course.

Takeaways

After this lesson, students should

1. Be able to critically examine a piece of contemporary research and pose meaningful questions to gauge the validity and limitations of its results.
2. Be able to flexibly invoke and synthesize course concepts in a real world dialogue on science and society.

The definitions for this lesson very depending on your paper and guest. These examples were used at UC Berkeley in Spring 2023.

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Disfluency

Pauses that disrupt normal speaking patterns.

• Filled Pauses

  When the pause is filled with an utterance like "uh" or "um."

• Unfilled Pauses

  When no utterance fills the pause. Note that unfilled pauses are not always disfluencies.

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Referent

The object that a given set of sounds refers to.

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Novel

An object or word that has not ever been encountered before.

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Discourse-new

An object or word that has not previously come up in a given discourse. These may or may not be novel.

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Principle of Contrast

The idea that novel objects will be attached to novel words.

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Determiners

Words that identify or distinguish a referent without describing or modifying it. For example, the word "the."

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Lexical Category

Type of word.

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Prosody

The patterns of stress and intonation in someone's speech.

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Online Word Recognition

Word recognition that's happening live (in the moment) as opposed to figuring out words afterwards.

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Eye-tracking Studies

A class of studies that measure where people look or how their gaze shifts. These are common throughout psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science research as a proxy for people's behavior, attention, and cognition.

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