ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide guidance for novel as well as more seasoned researchers in understanding the fundamental characteristics, complementary strengths and uses of online and offline measures commonly employed in experimental linguistics. Specifically, we showcase a range of more and less established online measures, including response times, eye-fixations, skin conductance responses (SCR), event-related potentials (ERP), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), alongside representative offline measures such as similarity ratings, accuracy scores, corpus-based frequencies, and categorisation preferences. We centre on measures and illustrate their relevance and application across methods. We tie individual measures to specific research questions and show how they are implemented in experiments. Our example experiments illustrate variation of measures within one domain, namely linguistic relativity, the notion that the languages we speak impact our cognition in predictable ways. We find this approach particularly informative on two levels. Not only does research on linguistic relativity boast a variety of measures to help scholars focus on different aspects of sensory and linguistic processing but exploring studies in this domain also invites a critical comparison between the characteristics each measure offers.
