In which I step out of the Ivory Tower

[philena]

I am an intellectual snob in many ways. I've noticed this about myself: when I read the newspaper in which the results of data-driven studies are reported, my first thought is not, "Oh, how interesting to observe this connection between X and Y," but rather, "Did they control for Z? Are they aware that there could be a selection bias? They know it'

Comments

[philena]

In phylogenetic analyses of languages, the borrowing problem is a real hassle. Fortunately, though, I'm not a typologist or a historical linguist. I'm a psycholinguist, so I study language use. Here are some examples of how psycholinguists use statistical analysis:

-Measuring word duration or reaction time to word stimuli as a function of things like the frequency of the word, its phonological neighborhood density (i.e., how many other words are in this language that sound similar to this word), information content (i.e., given the words that have been said already, how likely is this word in that context?), and so on. This tells us a lot about how people retrieve words from their mental lexicon.

--Measuring proportions of looks at particular items during eye tracking studies. Certain sentences can be ambiguous to parse in some contexts, but not in others, and tracking people's gazes at some scene in front of them helps linguists determine how they're interpreting the sentence as the sentence unfolds in real time.

--Measuring morphological productivity. In a large corpus of language, how many instances of a word in a given morphological category occur exactly once? How many instances are there of this category, regardless of repeats? The ratio of the former to the latter is one measure of morphological productivity.

[verrucaria]

That's cool. I did phylogenetics of biological evolutionary flavor, so my mind automatically drifted to that. :)

What you are doing sounds plenty hard, too, though, from the planning/design, data collection, and data organization standpoint--or standpoints, I guess.