There is no substitute for actual hands-on experience in the lab when it comes to giving you a close-up view of what language processing research is all about. Undergraduates have the opportunity to do hands-on research as paid research assistants, for course credit, or as part of honors theses. Check out Brown's UTRA (Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistant) program if you are interested in a summer research assistantship. In the lab, students learn about the process of designing experiments, creating stimuli, and collecting and analysing data. In some cases, undergraduates have had enough involvement in the scientific process to merit co-authorship on published papers, and have presented their work at international conferences. Here are a couple of such papers and conference presentations that have involved undergrads in key roles:

Sussman, R. & Sedivy, J. (2003). The time course of processing syntactic dependencies: Evidence from eye movements during spoken narratives. Language and Cognitive Processes.18, 143-163.

Sedivy, J., Demuth, K., Chunyo, G. & Freedman, S. (2000). Incremental Referentially-Based Language Processing in Young Children: Evidence from Eye Movement Monitoring. Proceedings of the 24th BU Conference on Language Development. Boston: Cascadilla Press.

Sussman, R. & Sedivy. (2000). Argument Structure and the Time Course of Gap-filling Processes. Paper presented at the 4th annual conference on Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing, Leiden, Germany.

Sedivy, J., Demuth, K., Chunyo, G., & Freedman, S. (1999). Incremental referentially-based language processing in young children. Poster presented at the 12th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY.