Metholodogical skills

Methodological Skills (TW8531)
Spring 2012, Research Masters in Linguistics, University of Amsterdam
Teacher: Tamás Biró
Rooster
Studiegids

Course description

Block 1:

Week 1: Introduction: course requirements; methodologies in the history of linguistics; basic concepts of probability theory and statistics.
Download pdf.
Download
test.

Week 2: Sampling and probability. Descriptive statistics.
Download
pdf.
Student projects: discussion of the ideas.
SPSS-lab: entering and visualizing data.
Extra stuff: some notes on descriptive statistics (by me, originally from 2008)
as well as
extra formulas (passwd protected, by Rob Schoonen, from 2011).

Week 3: Sampling methods. Research design.
Download pdf.
SPSS-lab: entering and visualizing data.

Week 4: Sampling distributions. Data collection 1: issues of reliability and validity.
Download pdf.
Articles presented:

Grefenstette and Tapanainen. 'What is a word, What is a sentence? Problems of tokenization' (presented by Sophie).
Tomasello, M., D. Stahl, 'Sampling children’s spontaneous speech: how much is enough?' (2004), in: Journal of child language, 31, 101-121 (presented by Caitlin).
Cucchiarini et al. (2009). 'Oral proficiency training in Dutch L2: The contribution of ASR-based corrective feedback', Speech Communication 51:853-863 (presented by Elisabetta).

Week 5: Data collection 2: issues of reliability and validity. Central Limit Theorem.
Download pdf. Download Excel experiment on sampling distributions.
Research project: discussing the research questions.

Week 6: Significance tests 1.
Download
pdf.
Student projects: discussion of the research designs.
Articles presented:

Bakeman and Gottman (1997). Chapter 4: Assessing observer agreement (presented by Simone).

Week 7:Discussion of student project.
Download pdf.

Block 2:

Week 8:Significance tests (z and t). Power.
Download
pdf.
SPSS-lab: computing and recoding variables, importing data, one-sample t-tests.

Week 9: Significance tests (z and t).
Articles presented:

Borsboom et al (2004). The concept of validity (presented by Tilly).
Rens Bod (2003). Introduction to Elementary Probability Theory and Formal Stochastic Language Theory. In: Probabilistic Linguistics, edited by Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, Stefanie Jannedy (presented by Isabel).

Week 10: Power: what are tests good for? Cohen (1992 and 1994).
Article presented:

Rob Schoonen on internal validity, 1991 (presented by Brechje).

Week 11: Clustering. Two-sample t-test.
SPSS-lab: two-sample t-test.
Article presented:

Clusering and phylogenetic methods (presented by Eline), based on this and/or this article.

Week 12: Various null-hypotheses and various tests. Download pdf.
Student projects: discussion of statistical procedures.
Article presented:

Becky Childs and Christine Mallinson (2004). African American English in Appalachia. Dialect accommodation and substrate influence. Download (presented by Nika).

Week 13: Various null-hypotheses and various tests. Download pdf.
Student projects: discussion of statistical procedures.

SPSS-lab (not part of the course, but recommended to those wishing to know more about SPSS):

  1. Crosstabs, proportions, chi-square test.
  2. ANOVA and non-parametric tests.

Week 14: ANOVA. Download pdf.
Student projects: discussion of statistical procedures.
Article presented:

M. Verhallen and R. Schoonen (1993). Lexical knowledge of monolingual and bilingual children. Download (presented by Alma).

 

Material and mock exam for the test.

Final exam: Tuesday, May 29, starting at 11.00 in BH 015.

Deadline for submitting the papers: July 1.

 

Compulsory readings:

Sampling: Judd et al., chapter 6.pdf. pdf (2.935 Mbyte, passwd protected).
Judd et al., chapter 9.pdf. pdf (2.761 Mbyte, passwd protected).

Research design: W. L. Neuman, Social Research Methods. pdf (7.5 Mb, passwd protected).

Reliability: L. F. Bachman (2004), Statistical Analyses for Language Assessment. Chapter 4 (4.1 Mb, passwd protected) and chapter 5 (4.7 Mb, passwd protected).

Validity: L. F. Bachman (2004), Statistical Analyses for Language Assessment. Chapter 6 (4.6 Mb, passwd protected).

Significance testing and power: Jacob Cohen, A power primer (1992; 0.8 Mb, passwd protected) and The earth is round (p < .05) (1994; 0.8 Mb, passwd protected).

ANOVA: Runyon and Haber (1980), Fundamentals of Behavioral Statistics, chapt. 15 (2.2 Mb, passwd protected).