Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R
R. H. BaayenStatistical analysis is a useful skill for linguists and psycholinguists, allowing them to understand the quantitative structure of their data. This textbook provides a straightforward introduction to the statistical analysis of language data.
Designed for linguists with a non-mathematical background, it clearly introduces
the basic principles and methods of statistical analysis, using R, the leading computational statistics programming environment. The reader is guided step-by-step through a range of real data sets, allowing them to analyze phonetic data, construct phylogenetic trees, quantify register variation in corpus linguistics, and analyze experimental data using state-of-the-art models. The visualization of data plays a key role, both in the early stages of data exploration and later on when the reader is encouraged to criticize initial models fitted to the data. Containing over 40 exercises with model answers, this book will be welcomed by all linguists wishing to learn more about working with and presenting quantitative data.
The program R is available at http://cran.at.r-project.org/. The data sets and ancillary functions discussed in this book have been brought together in the language R package, which is available at the same URL.
R. H. BAAYEN is Professor of Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. He is author of Word Frequency Distributions (2001), co-editor of Morphological Structure in Language Processing (2003), and has published widely in linguistics and psycholinguistics journals.