This chapter addresses how one could quantify and explore the impact of geopolitics on global businesses. Computational geopolitics is an attempt to integrate quantitative methods and geopolitical analysis to understand and predict trends. The explosive growth of data, improvements in computational power, and access to cloud computing have led to a proliferation of computational methods in analyzing geopolitics and its impact on companies. The chapter explores some tools and techniques used in computational geopolitics, including events-based approaches to measuring geopolitical tensions, textual approaches, and empirical approaches. In addition, it provides examples of ways in which analysts can quantify the impact of geopolitics on trade and foreign direct investment. It also introduces experimental methods to assess the effectiveness of companies’ strategic responses to geopolitical tensions. Large language models (LLMs) can be used for sentiment analysis, spotting trends, scenario building, risk assessment, and strategic recommendations. While they methods offer advances in quantifying the impact of geopolitics on global businesses, analysts should also be cautious about data quality and availability as well as the complexity of the phenomenon and the geopolitics of AI. The chapter concludes by pointing the reader to some widely used data sources for computational geopolitics.

This chapter provides an accessible introduction to experimental methods for social and behavioral scientists. We cover the process of experimentation from generating hypotheses through to statistical analyses. The chapter discusses classical issues (e.g., experimental design, selecting appropriate samples) but also more recent developments that have attracted the attention of experimental researchers. These issues include replication, preregistration, online samples, and power analyses. We also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of experimental methods. We conclude by noting that, for many research questions, experimental methods provide the strongest test of hypothesized causal relationships. Furthermore, well-designed experiments can elicit the same mental processes as in the real world; this typically makes them generalizable to new people and real-life situations.

In the volume’s afterword, the founder of the Discourse–Pragmatic Variation and Change Research network assesses how the field has expanded over recent decades, and offers suggestions for its future development. The afterword discusses the strengths of this volume, including the breadth and diversity of topics covered. It calls for further studies of discourse–pragmatic variation in contact settings, for cross–linguistic comparisons, and for studying languages other than English, arguing that such analyses will facilitate exploration of how discourse–pragmatic variation and change manifests across languages. It also recommends an expansion of data sources, methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks, arguing that such expansion will diversify the kind of research questions discourse variationists can be pursue.

Psycholinguists often use experimental tasks of word recognition as a window onto understanding how we process words. Here, we review results with the lexical decision task that show sensitivity to morphological structure in that word recognition task. We then highlight the limitations of assuming that evidence of morphological processing is best interpreted as evidence that lexical entries are decomposed into constituent morphemes. Further, when target words follow primes formed from the same stem and presented at brief durations so as to tap into early processing in the lexical decision task, we argue that finding no difference between semantically transparent and opaque pairs in individual priming experiments is not sufficient to conclude that early analysis proceeds without regard to a word’s semantic properties. We familiarize the reader with the intricacies of the priming methodology for the lexical decision task and the claim that target recognition benefits from structural priming based on repetition of a stem morpheme in prime and target in . Inwe then discuss how outcomes change with processing time for the prime and its implication for the claim that when processing time for the prime is curtailed, morphological processing is insensitive to semantics. We argue instead that morphological priming cannot be attributed solely to the letter sequence that constitutes the stem in part because stem repetition accounts downplay the role of differences and similarities of whole-word targets with words other than just its prime. Inwe provide evidence that challenges an account of early morphological processing based on the form but not the semantic consequences of shared morphology between prime and target. In , we summarize meta-analytic results with funnel plots to ascertain the reliability of early effects of semantic similarity among morphological relatives in lexical decision, thus refuting support for a decomposition account that is semantically blind and based on stem form. Finally, in , we touch upon the power of tuning form-with-semantics models across languages and writing systems that differ with respect to their morphological structure and neighborhood density measures by emphasizing patterning distributed across words rather than local decomposition into morphemes. As an alternative throughout, we align results with models in which analysis of wordform and meaning are interdependent, rather than two independent and sequential processes, thus discounting the privileged role reserved for the stem.

Competing models of lexical access propose contrasting roles for morphological structure in word recognition. Whole-word models suggest that there are no separate representations for morphemes (e.g., Tyler et al. ); decomposition models posit that words are recognized by accessing their constituent morphemes (e.g., Taft et al. ); and hybrid models incorporate both pathways to recognition (e.g., Bertram et al. ). The relative productivity of a word’s derivational affixes may also play a role: words with unproductive affixes are processed holistically whereas words with productive derivational affixes are processed as a function of their morphemes (e.g., Balling and Baayen ). In this paper, we examine the role of the Semitic consonantal root, known to be a route for lexical retrieval, and its interaction with relative binyan productivity. Extending the methodology developed by Wray () for Jordanian Arabic, we investigate the Semitic language Maltese. Based on two auditory lexical decision experiments, we find a reverse base frequency effect in a productive binyan (words with more frequent roots are recognized more slowly than words with less frequent roots), and in two less productive binyanim we find no base frequency effect. This supports the validity of models in which morphological decomposition is relevant strictly for productive affixes.

The present study explores the learnability of complex morphological patterns, specifically number and gender categories. The typology of morphological systems suggests that infrequent, complex, and structurally marked categories such as the dual are more likely to show neutralization or syncretism than unmarked categories. In two artificial language learning experiments, adult English speakers were exposed to a language with noun class categories both for gender and number. Results suggest that syncretism of gender across dual forms allows for greater learnability of the dual form. However, overall learnability was not affected by whether syncretism occurred in the singular, dual, or plural. These results further the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that shape complex morphological patterns.

Anaphora play a key role in syntactic theorizing, but experimental investigations of coreference – especially when using acceptability judgments – involve unique methodological challenges. Given that non-linguist participants are unlikely to be familiar with linguistic notations such as the use of subscripts, how can researchers indicate the coreference relation whose acceptability is being assessed? In other words, if a researcher wants to test whether a particular coindexation relation is acceptable, how can this information be conveyed to participants? Ignoring this issue can yield uninterpretable data. This chapter provides an in-depth discussion of different methods for indicating coreference when researchers want to elicit acceptability judgments from participants who are not trained linguists. The chapter also discusses other approaches relevant for anaphora, including antecedent-choice tasks and real-time methods (self-paced reading, eye-tracking), and explains how they differ in terms of the kind of data they yield and thus the kinds of hypotheses they can be used to investigate.

This chapter examines the role of experimentation within the social identity approach to the study of identity. The main question of interest concerns the ways in which experimental methods give particular shape to how identity is understood within this tradition. We will examine the historical, theoretical, and practical development of the social identity approach and of experimentation in psychology, and then show how the two have converged so as to create an insightful, and yet simultaneously limited and at times even problematic, understanding of identity. This particular constellation of theoretical assumptions and practical methods has produced an impressive body of important research. It has also led to the establishment and entrenchment of theoretical and methodological biases of which researchers often seem to be unaware, but which nevertheless considerably influence the study of identity within the social identity tradition. Thus, in light of the rich output of the social identity approach, the chapter examines some of the limitations of that tradition and attempts to draw researchers’ attention to the theoretical and methods-based biases of which they may not be aware. In this way, the chapter is an attempt to explore how experimental methods and theory have interacted within the social identity tradition to both the benefit and detriment of our understanding of identity.