122253 AR Linguistics Course (Advanced 1-5) - Appl. & TEFL / Hist. & Descr. (2015W)

This course provides an introduction to statistics with a particular focus on the analysis of data coming from various subareas of linguistic research, such as general linguistics, sociolinguistics, PPN linguistics, historical linguistics, or first/second language acquisition research.

It covers descriptive as well as univariate inferential statistics, i.e. measures of central tendency and variability, parameter estimation and confidence intervals, null hypothesis significance testing (e.g. t-test, chi-squared-test, U-test,...), correlation, effect sizes and power analysis.

The course is primarily based on Butler (1985), "Statistics in linguistics". Since this is a Blocklehrveranstaltung, students are advised to read the first couple of chapters for the first session and hand in a pre-course exercise (for details see moodle).

For calculating purposes, the statistical software package R together with the frontend RStudio will be used. Both are already installed on the PCs in the PC labs. Since most of the assignments will require calculations with R(Studio), the correct version of this software is needed to be installed on your own computer.

No previous knowledge of statistics or statistical software is required but a solid knowledge of high school mathematics (at least Unterstufe) will prove useful.