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

You have coded a lot of data about how tokens of (r) are pronounced. Now it's time to see what differences there are between groups of speakers and between linguistic contexts. What differences do you expect? That is, which groups or contexts will have more [r-1] than others? Which do you think will have less?

State two hypotheses indicating your expectations. Make sure they are clear and objective, with no hedging. One should be about a predicted social factor effect and the other about a predicted linguistic factor effect.

To prepare your data to test your hypotheses, first, open your token file (the one with all your speakers' data) 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 you are testing first.

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

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.
For two of them, include your hypothesis and a sentence indicating how the data do or don't support the hypothesis.

Note: So, far, you have been doing univariate analysis – looking at only one independent variable at a time. Later, you will 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 17, 2025