Here are two papers that may be useful for researchers in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science:Shravan Vasishth and Bruno Nicenboim. Statistical methods for linguistic research: Foundational Ideas - Part I. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2016. In Press. PDF: http://bit.ly/VasNicPart1Code: http://bit.ly/VasNicPart1CodeBruno Nicenboim and ... [Read more...]

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It's a pain to design statistics exercises each semester, and because students from previous share old exercises with the new incoming students, it's hard to design simple exercises that students haven't already seen the answers to. On top of that, som... [Read more...]

Here is my MSc thesis, which was submitted to the University of Sheffield in September 2015. The pdf is here.Title: A Meta-analysis of Relative Clause Processing in Mandarin Chinese using Bias Modelling AbstractThe reading difficulty associated wi... [Read more...]

I spent the last two weeks teaching frequentist and Bayesian statistics at the European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) in Barcelona, at the beautiful and centrally located Pompeu Fabra University. The course web page for the first week is here, and the web page for the second ... [Read more...]

[This post was written between 2012 and 2015] Some background:I started using statistics for my research sometime in 1999 or 2000. I was a student at Ohio State, Linguistics, and I had just gotten interested in psycholinguistics. I knew almost nothing ... [Read more...]

Barr et al's well-intentioned paper is starting to lead to some seriously weird behavior in psycholinguistics! As a reviewer, I'm seeing submissions where people take the following approach:1. Try to fit a "maximal" linear mixed model.  If you get... [Read more...]

Recently, Barr et al published a paper in the Journal of Memory and Language, arguing that we should fit maximal linear mixed models, i.e., fit models that have a full variance-covariance matrix specification for subject and for items. I suggest here t... [Read more...]

Following a discussion on Gelman's blog, I was playing around with simulating scientists looking for significant effects. Suppose each of 1000 scientists run 200 experiments in their lifetime, and suppose that 20% of the experiments are such that the n... [Read more...]

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Here is a comparison of lmer vs Stan output on a mildly complicated dataset from a psychology expt. (Kliegl et al 2011). The data are here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pwuz1g7rtwy17p1/KWDYZ_test.rda.The data and paper available from: http://openscience.u... [Read more...]

As part of my course in bayesian data analysis, I have put up some common linear mixed models that we fit in psycholinguistics. These are written in JAGS and Stan. Comments and suggestions for improvement are most welcome.Code: http://www.ling.uni-pots... [Read more...]

I decided to teach a basic course on bayesian data analysis with a focus on psycholinguistics. Here is the course website (below). How could this possibly be a bad idea!http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~vasishth/advanceddataanalysis.html [Read more...]

As part of my long slog towards statistical understanding, I started making notes on the very specific topic of linear models. The details are tricky and hard to keep in mind, and it is difficult to go back and forth between books and notes to try to r... [Read more...]

Recently, on Andrew Gelman's blog there was a discussion about how to get yourself a statistics education (presumably without going through the whole process of becoming a professional statistician). Here's the discussion on Gelman's blog, with lots of... [Read more...]

I foolishly tried to convert a matrix M to a vector using vector:vector(M)But this is done column wise, so that adjacent row items end up non-adjacent.The right way to do this seems to be:library(data)unmatrix(M, byrow=TRUE) [Read more...]

Our book is finally coming out: You can buy it on Amazon.com, Amazon.de, or Springer.com. [Read more...]

This should be standard in Textmate, I don't know why one has to go through so many steps to get it working:http://gragusa.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/textmate-emacs-like-indentation-for-r-files/ [Read more...]