Resources

Praat Tutorials

Here's a little selection of tutorials I've written to get you started doing things with the great, free phonetics program Praat. I will update this list from time to time as I write more. If you like them and would like me to do more, or if you hate them and would like me to fix them and/or just stop, let me know!

• Basic Tutorial: this one is for complete novices, and covers most of the basic bases, but it could have a tip or two that are of some use to more experienced users as well. Here is the sample sound used in the practice exercises: "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain."

R Tutorials

R is a powerful, flexible, free statistics software package that works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix, that has great graphing capabilities to boot. However, it basically runs through a kind of scripting-language interface, so it can be daunting to begin using for the un-initiated. (Note that there are some GUI extensions of R, like R Commander, but I haven't tried any of these and therefore have nothing to tell you about them.)

There are many good places to start if you are interested in a full-blown introduction to using R. I myself cut my R teeth on Harald Baayen's recent book, Analyzing Linguistic Data, but there are many good links to other intros on the R site itself. Finally, there are a number of listservs that people use to ask each other questions. The R-lang listserv specializing in people using R for psycholinguistics is very active and helpful.

With all these great resources out there, there still seems to be a lack of a "Cliff's Notes" or "R for Dummies" kind of intro to using R for various things of interest to psycholinguistics. Thus I am attempting to provide that in the tutorials below. They are intended to be ultra-minimal how-tos for people with little or no R experience, with example code that you can crib from. So if you want to really learn R, you should eventually take the time to read a more thorough introduction. But if you just want to try out using R to do things to see how it basically works, try some of the following tutorials. Note: all of these are essentially works in progress, which I will occasionally add to and update.

• Getting R and installing packages on your machine
• Managing an R session
• Some basic functions every R user should know
• Getting data in and out of R
• Using R to do some descriptive exploration of your data
• Basic tests like t-tests, chi-square tests, and simple linear regressions.
• Running standard ANOVAs, particularly for repeated-measures designs common in psycholinguistics.
• The conceptual basics and how-tos of using linear mixed-effects models in R (also referred to as "mixed models", "multi-level models", "hierarchical linear models", etc.)

Other stuff

Coming soon: other little tools & tutorials, like R stuff, DMDX stuff, etc.