arli1Whalen ARI 25 August 2014 21:38 Taking the Laboratory into the Field D.H. Whalen1,2 and Joyce McDonough3 1Program in Speech–Language–Hearing Sciences, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016; email:
[email protected] 2Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511 3Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627 Annu. Rev. Linguist. 2015. 1:14.1–14.21 Keywords The Annual Review of Linguistics is online at phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, experiments, language linguistics.annualreviews.org documentation This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124915 Abstract Copyright © 2015 by Annual Reviews. We review the development of methodologies and technologies of All rights reserved empirical linguistic work done outside traditional academic labora- tories. The integration of such results with contemporary language documentation and linguistic theory is an increasingly important component of language analysis. Taking linguistic inquiry out of the lab and away from well-described and familiar data brings challenges in logistics, ethics, and the definition of variability within language use. In an era when rapidly developing technologies offer new poten- tial for collecting linguistic data, the role of empirical or experimental work in theoretical discussions continues to increase. Collecting linguistic data on understudied languages raises issues about its aim vis-à-vis the academy and the language communities, and about its integration into linguistic theory.