Syllabus and overview
This course is a hands-on introduction to fundamentals of quantitative/statistical methodology in linguistics. It is based on the third (2021) edition of my textbook Statistics for linguistics with R: […]. We begin by looking at a few basic notions such as variables and hypotheses, familiarize ourselves with how data from experiments and corpora should be set up for subsequent statistical evaluation, and discuss the logic of quantitative studies using the null-hypothesis falsification approach. Then, we are concerned with a variety of descriptive graphs and statistics for frequency data, averages, dispersions, and correlations. The largest part is concerned with a variety of statistical tests: distribution fitting tests, tests for independence, and tests for differences for frequencies, means, dispersions, and correlations. We end with a small primer for the kind of multifactorial methods that are the subject of Ling 105. We use the open source software tool R 
.
Downloads for class sessions
(files will be available as appropriate)
Folder for the whole course
Navigator
Additional files to be added to that folder per session:
For session 01: introduction slides
For session 02: the answer key for the exercises in class, the qmd file on Quarto, the knitted version
For session 03: the qmd file and the Google document for the practice session, answer key for the exercises in class
For session 04: the qmd file and the Google document for the practice session, answer key for the exercises in class
For session 05: the qmd file and the Google document for the practice session, answer key for the exercises in class
For session 06: the qmd file and the Google document for the practice session, answer key for the exercises in class
For session 07: the qmd file and the Google document for the practice session, answer key for the exercises in class
For session 08: the qmd file and the Google document for the practice session, answer key for the exercises in class
For session 09: the qmd file and the Google document for the practice session, answer key for the exercises in class
For session 10: the qmd file and the Google document for the practice session, answer key for the exercises in class
Assignments
All assignments in one HTML file are available here
Software
R (from CRAN) (required, minimally version >4.5, ideally the current version 4.5.3)
RStudio (required, minimally some 2026 version, ideally the current version 2026.01.2-418)