LIN 351 Week 8 HW: Distributional analysis of your (r) data

1. For your Week 3 HW, you were asked to choose speakers that allow you to make a comparison among speakers that interests you. Now, state that comparison as a testable hypothesis about a social independent variable.
2. Then create a table that specifically tests that hypothesis.
3. Explain what the outcome is, as illustrated by your table. Is your hypothesis confirmed or not?
4. Next, state a hypothesis about the effect of one of the linguistic independent variables.
5. Then create a table that specifically tests that hypothesis.
6. Explain what the outcome is, as illustrated by your table. Is your hypothesis confirmed or not?

To make tables for your analysis, open your token file (the one with all your coded speakers) in Excel.

Choose how to sort your data, to show the distribution of each dependent variable with respect to each variant of the independent variable.

The best way to do this is with Pivot Tables, a valuable Excel tool.

• Select all your data
• Choose "Summarize with Pivot Table" from Excel's Data menu.
• When prompted, choose "New worksheet" for the location of your Pivot Table. You shouldn't need to fill in anything else in that pop-up window. Click "OK."
• Either experiment and see if you can see how to make the tables you need intuitively, or follow these instructions.
• In the new sheet, you'll see "PivotTable Fields" on the right.
• From the "Field Name" list at the top, select the name of your dependent variable column and drag it to the "Columns" field. Also drag it to the "Values" field.
• In the "Values" field, click the little "i" (in a circle) to the right of the variable name and make sure that "Count" is selected.
• Select the name of one independent variable column and drag it to the "Rows" field.
• Your new pivot table displays a list of how many tokens for each variant of your dependent variable exist in each level of your independent variable. [See sample pivot table for a small subset of data.] If this looks good (maybe hide any "blank" rows/columns first), copy the table and "Paste Special > Values to a different (new) sheet in your Excel file.
• In the copied version, add a column to calculate the "Percent [r]"
• In the row for the first level of the independent variable, in that new column, type a formula that gives you the ratio of [r] / total (n) for that row.
• Fill that formula down to every row of the table.
• Choose the "%" format from the Number formatting options. Here is an illustration of the copied table and then an improved version of it below.
• You can now see how often [r], rather than [0], was produced for each level of the independent variable, across all your speakers. What does it show you?
• Repeat these steps to make a similar table for each linguistic and each social independent variable, always reporting the dependent variable in your columns.

Submit these tables for your Week 8 homework.

Note: So, far, you have been doing univariate analysis – looking at only one independent variable at a time. Later, you will learn about analysis with more than one independent variable included. This is very important when your data set does not have a balanced distribution of every combination of every independent variable. That is, when you are dealing with real world data.

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Updated February 16, 2023