Your research question

What a research question isn't, and how to find a good one.

What isn't a research question

Often students come to LEAD with questions they're interested in researching and addressing as part of their project and think they've settled on a research question. But these initial areas of interest are not actually fully developed research questions. For example:

These are not research questions

How is language structure affected by population structure?

How does the place where a person lives affect their language use?

How does exposure to different languages affect language development?

How and why do language structures change over time?

Sometimes, students are even more general than this, saying they are interested in language and cognition, or language and gender. These are general areas of research interest, not research questions. These areas are so general that entire books can (and have) been written about them - they aren't research questions because they can't possibly have specific answers you could address within you dissertation.

However, these general areas can be useful as starting points. You can use a general area of interest to work your way to a specific research question that is tractable for an undergraduate research project. Before you continue, have a look at the general areas covered by the faculty members in LEAD to assess whether this is a good fit for your project. These will be listed as part of the SEL3326, SEL3327 (extended study) and SEL3329 (dissertation) modules in Canvas. If you don't have access to this just yet, look at the research interests listed on staff pages on the university website.

Formulating a research question

Using the four general interest areas identified above - that are too general to be research questions - we can hone in on more specific questions related to these areas:

These are research questions

How does population turnover and growth affect the complexity of morphological systems?

How does suburban development affect language use?

Is there cross-linguistic transfer at the syntax-semantics interface in bilingual language acquisition?

At this point, you could choose to address these questions by taking a novel synthesis/literature overview approach (like Trends in Cognitive Science), but LEAD projects generally address research questions using data. Now that we have more specific questions, we can address these with particular methods and datasets:

Research questions and evidence sources

Population growth and turnover and language complexity: Evidence from an agent-based model

Suburban development and language use: Evidence from greater St. Louis

Investigating cross-linguistic language transfer at the syntax-semantics interface: Evidence from German-English bilinguals

These are specific examples, but think of each general interest area as a complex branching tree: at each point there is a large possibility space, but you need to choose a specific path to tackle for your project. Undergraduate independent projects will inevitably only cover one or two branches of this complex tree, since the time you have to spend on your project is limited (and note that it will be more limited for an extended study than for a full year dissertation). However, it's important to remember that one research question can lead to lots of different approaches, for example, you could tackle the issue of population size and morphological complexity using a model, but it's also possible to address this using cross-linguistic datasets (see e.g., Lupyan & Dale, 2010).

Looking at the list of specific questions and methods outlined above, you'll notice how these look a bit like the titles of projects or papers you might have seen before. That's not an accident. These are topics of actual papers, which have been slotted into a boring template reflecting a Research Question: Evidence Source format. The actual titles are a bit more interesting:

• A social approach to rule dynamics using an agent-based model (Cuskley, Loreto, and Kirby, 2018)

• The influence of suburban development and metropolitan fragmentation on language variation and change: Evidence from Greater St. Louis (Duncan, 2019)​

• The acquisition of dative alternation by German-English bilingual and English monolingual children (Woods, 2015)​

If you glance at these papers, you'll see that they represent a lot of work, sometimes across multiple authors, and regardless indicate years worth of training and data collection and thousands of person hours. The point of showing how these develop from general question is not that your undergraduate dissertation is meant to be a piece of published work (although there's nothing to say it can't be!). The point is that:

1. General interest needs to lead to...

2. A specific question, which can...

3. Be addressed using a particular method.

You can see some actual examples of very successful undergraduate dissertations at Newcastle from ELLDR, the English Language and Linguistics Dissertation Repository. This repository is a diverse selection of successful projects from previous years - use this to give you an idea of the kind of thing you can do, but remember to do your own thing! This will be your independent project, after all.

Finding your research question

At a minimum, your studies at Newcastle so far should have piqued some kind of general interest. If you have a general interest but not a specific question, or a specific question without a methodological approach, look at academic staff members' webpages to get an idea of what they work on.