PCIbex Farm for Online Linguistic Research: Design and Implementation

In recent years, experimental linguistics and psycholinguistics have increasingly adopted online data collection methods. This trend is closely related to the widespread use of web-based platforms that facilitate participant recruitment and enable flexible experimental designs. This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the PCIbex platform and the PennController extension in experimental linguistic research. First, the paper outlines and exemplifies the main types of studies that can be conducted using PCIbex. Building on this overview, the study then presents a detailed example application to illustrate the practical use of the platform. Specifically, a self-paced reading experiment is introduced to demonstrate how the processing of the coindexation of null and overt subject pronouns in embedded clauses with their antecedents in Turkish can be investigated in an online environment. The experimental workflow is described step by step, covering informed consent, instructions, participant information forms, practice trials, the main test phase, and data storage. Special attention is given to the event-based structure of the results file generated by PennController and to the procedures for transferring and summarizing the data in the R environment using descriptive statistics. Overall, the study shows that PCIbex and PennController offer an accessible, reproducible, and scalable framework for conducting a wide range of online experimental studies in linguistics.

 Keywords: PCIbex, PennController, Experimental linguistics, Self-paced reading, Online experimentation