Statistics with R and S-Plus tutorial presented at the Third Workshop on Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research (EMLAR)

This workshop will introduce the R programming environment for statistical analysis. Contrary to SPSS which is procedure-oriented (commands are verbs, e.g. “compute”), R is object-oriented (objects are nouns, e.g. “factor”). In this workshop, we will try to ease the learning curve of using R for your data analysis. Experience with statistical software is NOT required! We will use data simulation as well as real data sets, to explore topics like t-tests, chi-square tests, and logistic regression. We will also show how R produces publication-quality figures. If time permits, we will also explore how to extend R with your own routines for analyzing and/or plotting data. You are encouraged to bring your own data set, if accompanied by a “codebook” file specifying variables (columns), data codes, etc. (Both files must be in plain ASCII).