LING280: Experimental methods in linguistics
Matt Wagers, instructor
Spring, 2011

⌛ Meets M/W 4:10-5:40pm, in The Cave

course resources

required text

The Foundations of Statistics: A Simulation-based Approach by Vasishth & Broe, Springer, 2010

supplementary

There is a useful library of books about R, experimental design, and statistics for linguistics research in 232 Stevenson.

Handbook of Biological Statistics
By John H. McDonald (UDel), lucid and accessible discussions

R resources

CRAN contributed R tutorials

Short's R reference card

Quick-R Web site

handouts

Transcripts, notes, etc.
  1. Meeting 2
    (R, sample statistics, CDF, etc.)
  2. Meeting 3
    (Binomial distribution)
  3. Meeting 4
    (Sampling distribution; Central Limit Theorem)
  4. Meeting 5-6
    (Confidence intervals, significance testing, t-test)
  5. Meeting 7
    (Design questions for our studies; Internal document link circulated on the mailing list)
  6. Meeting 8
    (Ordinal regression)
Lightly edited after class; send errors to M. Wagers

Assignments

  1. Problem Set 1 (due Apr 4)
  2. Problem Set 2 (due Apr 13)

course goals

  1. To introduce a set of principles for reasoning under uncertainty, i.e., inference via statistical model building and comparison;
  2. To apply those principles in the design and analysis of linguistics experiments.

To accomplish these objectives, we will learn to conduct two kinds of experiment: an acceptability study and a reaction time study. These two basic studies cover a wide range of issues and concerns and are of primary importance to linguistics since they allow the investigator to establish distributional facts about a language; to map the time-course of language processes; and, more generally, to discover patterns of complexity in linguistic knowledge.

This course is not a laundry-list introduction to a collection of tests and designs. It is about learning to build up your analysis from basic principles; becoming more adept consumers of information from the scientific and statistical literature; and thinking hard about how empirical observation and theory development feed one another.

meetings

Select individual events to view reading assignments and other details. You can also follow this calendar in your own calendaring application (XML, HTML, & iCAL streams).