The course also addresses design issues that make the analyses suitable for your experiment, such as sampling, data collection, and reliability and validity of measurements. You apply these concepts, together with the analysis techniques, to theoretical, typological and applied research in your linguistic subdisciplines. Special attention is paid to statistical inference, i.e. correct use and formulation of statistical results.

You do not need prior knowledge of statistical methods. If you do have such knowledge, you may in fact have to unlearn some internalized ways of thinking.

Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, you will

• have gained insight into the application of statistical and experimental methods in empirical research in linguistics;
• be able, given your data table, to compute the best mixed-effects model that describes your data by applying a technique called linear regression or a technique called logistic regression.  The software you will be able to use for accomplishing that is R.

NB: This is a course mainly meant for MA students. As a result, the amount of places for PhD researchers is extremely limited. Based on interest, we may organise a course specifically for PhD researchers next semester.