Statistics for Linguists: An Introduction Using R is the first statistics textbook on linear models for linguistics. The book covers simple uses of linear models through generalized models to more advanced approaches, maintaining its focus on conceptual issues and avoiding excessive mathematical details. It contains many applied examples using the R statistical programming environment. Written in an accessible tone and style, this text is the ideal main resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students of Linguistics statistics courses as well as those in other fields, including Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Data Science.

This book is an introduction to statistics for linguists using the open source software R. It is aimed at students and instructors/professors with little or no statistical background and is written in a non-technical and reader-friendly/accessible style. It first introduces in detail the overall logic underlying quantitative studies: exploration, hypothesis formulation and operationalization, and the notion and meaning of significance tests. It then introduces some basics of the software R relevant to statistical data analysis. A chapter on descriptive statistics explains how summary statistics for frequencies, averages, and correlations are generated with R and how they are graphically represented best. A chapter on analytical statistics explains how statistical tests are performed in R on the basis of many different linguistic case studies: For nearly every single example, it is explained what the structure of the test looks like, how hypotheses are formulated, explored, and tested for statistical significance, how the results are graphically represented, and how one would summarize them in a paper/article. A chapter on selected multifactorial methods introduces how more complex research designs can be studied: methods for the study of multifactorial frequency data, correlations, tests for means, and binary response data are discussed and exemplified step-by-step. Also, the exploratory approach of hierarchical cluster analysis is illustrated in detail. The book comes with many exercises, boxes with short think breaks and warnings, recommendations for further study, and answer keys as well as a statistics for linguists newsgroup on the companion website. The volume is aimed at beginners on every level of linguistic education: undergraduate students, graduate students, and instructors/professors and can be used in any research methods and statistics class for linguists. It presupposes no quantitative/statistical knowledge whatsoever and, unlike most competing books, begins at step 1 for every method and explains everything explicitly.

Linguists with no background in statistics will find this book to be an accessible introduction to statistics. Concepts are explained in non-technical terms, and mathematical formulas are kept to a minimum. The book incorporates SPSS, which is a statistics package that incorporates a point and click interface rather than complex line-commands. Step-by-step instructions are provided for some of the most widely used statistics in linguistics. At the same time, the concepts behind each procedure are also explained. Traditional analyses such as ANOVA and t-tests are included in the book, but linguistic data is often not amenable to such analyses. For this reason, non-parametric and mixed-effects procedures are also introduced.

Statistical 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. 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 programme. The reader is guided step-by-step through a range of real data sets, allowing them to analyse acoustic data, construct grammatical trees for a variety of languages, quantify register variation in corpus linguistics, and measure experimental data using state-of-the-art models. The visualization of data plays a key role, both in the initial stages of data exploration and later on when the reader is encouraged to criticize various models. 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.

Presents a wide variety of linguistic examples to demonstrate the use of statistics in summarizing data appropriately. The range of techniques introduced will help readers to evaluate and use literature employing statistical analysis, and to apply statistics in their own research.

A comprehensive and accessible introduction to statistics in corpus linguistics, covering multiple techniques of quantitative language analysis and data visualisation.

This textbook examines empirical linguistics from a theoretical linguist’s perspective. It provides both a theoretical discussion of what quantitative corpus linguistics entails and detailed, hands-on, step-by-step instructions to implement the techniques in the field. The statistical methodology and R-based coding from this book teach readers the basic and then more advanced skills to work with large data sets in their linguistics research and studies. Massive data sets are now more than ever the basis for work that ranges from usage-based linguistics to the far reaches of applied linguistics. This book presents much of the methodology in a corpus-based approach. However, the corpus-based methods in this book are also essential components of recent developments in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Material from the book will also be appealing to researchers in digital humanities and the many non-linguistic fields that use textual data analysis and text-based sensorimetrics. Chapters cover topics including corpus processing, frequencing data, and clustering methods. Case studies illustrate each chapter with accompanying data sets, R code, and exercises for use by readers. This book may be used in advanced undergraduate courses, graduate courses, and self-study.