| title | presented | author |
|---|---|---|
Putting the NO in ANOVA: the past, present and future (role) of statistics in linguistics and psychology |
9 September 2021 |
Phillip M. Alday |
Language science and psychological science have an uneasy relationship with statistics, both as a tool for dealing with data and a tool for building theories. In this talk, I will discuss the historical disappointments and resulting prejudices against statistics as well as critical insights made possible by statistics, before discussing the current state of the field. In particular, I will discuss what modern, computer-age statistical practice -- such as mixed-effects models, Bayesian statistics and machine learning -- has to offer compared to traditional tools and why it's time to use tools that Clark and Cohen could have only dreamed of. In this vein, I will highlight that classical tools were often insufficient even in their heyday and that the increased complexity of modern tools simply reflect the complexity of the underlying data, which we can no longer responsibly ignore. I will focus on modern statistical approaches as a tool for theory building -- both for theories with stochastic and variable components and as a tool for handling messy and variable real-world data -- instead of as an alternative to theory building. For example, I will touch upon how modern approaches allow for an integrative notion of intra- and interindividual variation, thus addressing an inherent data complexity and theoretical concern and allowing for nearly every study to be an individual-differences study. Finally, I will conclude with my vision for (the role of) statistics in the future of psychology and linguistics and provide a few suggestions for how to achieve that vision.
