QAParadigm
application program
The question-answer paradigm, or QAP, is a term used in psycho-linguistics to refer to a familiar mode of human discourse. The QAP is currently the subject of several lines of linguistics research.
This page is about the QAParadigm application program, which facilitates a common QAP experiment that involves display of a sentence, then a verbal question about the sentence.
The project is hosted at the SourceForge project page for QAParadigm.
Description
Of special interest in QAP investigations is that the interpretation of a dialog may be influenced by changes that make no syntactic difference, such as a choice of a verb or intonation.
In one type of linguistics study using the QAP, a textual statement is displayed to a test subject, and a question is asked verbally, to detect a difference in interpretation.
The QAParadigm program is meant to facilitate such experiments, by reducing the fuss of organizing and executing them.
- reads questions from a simple text file
- can automatically randomize question-answer pairs
- synchronizes displayed sentences with audio question files
- logs the order in which question-answer pairs were presented
- associates the subject’s personal data with the logged information
The program can be used in single-screen or multiple-screen modes.
Experiment description is in the form of simple Unicode-encoded text files. Any of the world’s writing systems can be used for the display, provided that supporting fonts are installed on the system.
The program has been tested and used in actual linguistics research projects.
System requirements
QAParadigm should run on any system that has Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.5 or later installed.
Fonts supporting the language to display need to be installed on the system.
Audio equipment is required to record the subject’s responses. QAParadigm does no audio recording.
Download
If you only want to run the program then you should download the QAParadigm executable JAR file.
To read detailed documentation, or to build or alter the program yourself, you may download the QAParadigm source files.