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BlackSquare

(software for linguistic experiments)

Documentation

The program is is designed to test subject's abilities to connect expressions or notions according to some given rules.

A) Design your Experiment

  1. Write down list of words to the "WordsL1.txt" and "WordsL2.txt" files.
  2. Each word can have some tags. These tags would help you to process the results of the experiment. The tags should be written in "TagsL1.txt" and "TagsL2.txt" files.
  3. Record sound representations of the words if needed. The records should be in "wavs" folder, named as "theword.wav" where "theword" is the exact entry of the word in "WordsL1.txt" or "WordsL2.txt".
  4. Modify "Settings.txt" file according to your preferences.
    1. Direction: If your subjects speak Arabic or Hebrew, you might prefere to use right to left direction.
    2. Font size: You can adjust the font size to the resolution of the screen.
    3. Touch: Specify whether you want to take an advantage from the touch screen and gestures or whether you prefere traditional button-based user interface.
    4. Window size (axis y and y): Yes, the BlackSquare can be also a black rectangle.
    5. Number of questions: You can impose upon your soubjects only a subset of your questions.
    6. Name of your experiment: It is convenient to create a new folder for each experiment (the software does not need to be installed so you can have as many copies as you want to), but newertheless, you can name your experiment for better tidiness of your data.
    7. Ordinal number of the next subject: The ordinal numbers of the subjects are recorded here. Every subject will have his / her own imput file named after his / her ordinal number. The ordinal number is being increased automatically.
    8. Allow zero answer: Decide whether the "No answer" is a permissible answer or not.
    9. Randomize the input: The words you have written can be randomized or not. Randomization does not effect the mutual relations between L1 and L2. The "Pairwise" option tells the application to randomize your words in such a way that pairs stay unchanged.
    10. Play response after an answer: The option "Yes" means that hthe subject will be given a feedback about whether his / her answer was right or not. This is valuable especially if you want to use the software for a training of some ability.
    11. Play sound representations of the words: Allow or forbid playing sound representation of a word.
    12. Message at the end: Enables you to provide your subjects with some feedback aout his / her performance in the test in his / her language. First %s stands for number of correctly answered questions and the second %s stands for the total number of questions.

B) Run the Experiment

The user interface cannot be easier:

  1. Use a vertical gesture for connecting the words with vertical lines.
  2. Use a diagonal gesture for connecting the words with crossing diagonal lines
  3. Touch a word to hear its sound representation.
  4. Use rigth to left gesture for approaching next four word. (Or left to right, see "Direction" in the Settings)

C) Process the Results

  1. The output files are named after your experiment name and the ordinal number of the subject. You can export the txt output file to the xls or other easilly.
  2. Fisher's Exact Test, the Minimal Ratio etc. can be used to test your hypotheses about the data, tagging of the words can help you to sort the outcomes.