Do you know that when we talk about Bell Curve in the statistics class, it’s actually more than just a bell shape?? Or how to tell which class made more progress, Reading Group A or Reading Group B? Or who speaks more Taiwanese, students in the College of Foreign Languages or students in the College of Science and Engineering? Or what is actually tested in a cloze test? Or how to determine rates of language change over time? Or how to tell the frequency of vocabulary? Or that actually we can manipulate numbers to let them look sensible??? (That’s why there is a book entitled How to Lie with Statistics!). And if you are interested in big data and data mining (such as through SAS-EM), you should also have some background knowledge in statistics.

      This course will give you a very basic introduction to statistics (descriptive statistics and inferential statistics) in the study of language. 

     Besides the in-class lectures, interactions, and exercises, we will watch a set of videos introducing basic statistic concepts and some hands-on practices on one of the popular statistical analysis program, SPSS. If time permits, we will also look at another program, SAS-EG. Furthermore, we will also try another free program briefly, R Commander (We are not learning R, the programming language for statistical computing. We will learn R Commander briefly, which is a basic graphical user interface for R).