ABSTRACT
Over the past decades, the use of experimental methods has become generalised in all domains of linguistics. Historically, this trend has been sparked by the growing need to examine causal relationships and by the idea that language users are an inexhaustible source of knowledge to understand how languages are produced, understood and used during social interactions, and more generally to evaluate linguistic hypotheses. In a nutshell, experimental methods currently represent an important foundation for research in all areas of linguistics and are used to assess linguistic representations on a broad range of different populations. The incorporation of experimental methods across fields in linguistics has come to be known as experimental linguistics. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
