The Director-Matcher Task Project aims to create a new flexible web toolkit for the collection of data for psychology, linguistic, and cognitive science based research. The toolkit was initially developed to record instances of code switching, a linguistic concept concerned with a speaker alternating between multiple languages during one conversation. The project is based on Toy Task experiments, a modification of the director-matcher task, developed at the University of Bangor’s bilingual research center. Traditionally, two subjects separated by a wall were tasked with matching object placement on a set of chessboards through vocal communication. The Director-Matcher Task Project uses web technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript, and PHP to digitize the concept. The toolkit separates the board and participants physically by providing an online interface for conducting code switching studies, allowing research to be carried out by subjects all over the world without direct physical contact. It also attempts to limit the cognitive bias of participants as much as possible, by removing as many references to a specific language as possible from the toy-task itself, to help foster more pure and natural code switching data. The toolkit further fosters the ability to analyze session voice data and board states to create corpora for the code switching experiments.http://opus.ipfw.edu/stu_symp2014/1020/thumbnail.jp
