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Baayen's Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R is aimed specifically at researchers from the fields of adult psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics. We feel, however, that it potentially has much to offer to people coming from the related discipline of language development. It is very innovative in its structure and content: it emphasises the practical need to learn and use statistics, and introduces advanced and modern techniques (Mixed-Effects Models) using cutting-edge software. These aspects of the book set it apart from most introductions to statistics for psychologists and might help in bringing about a much needed step forward in the way the child language research community understands and applies statistical techniques.
Although statistical methods have been well established in psychological research for some time, our use of them has always been somewhat conservative. We tend to stick to a few simple and popular techniques, for instance t tests and ANOVAs (both based on the so-called General Linear Model). These are robust methods, which are well-suited for most experimental, factorial designs. As such, they are sufficient in many cases. It is thus easy to forget that statistics is itself a growing field: the methods it offers constantly changes, new ones are constantly being developed and some of them might be better fitted for particular specific needs than older techniques.
Our conservativeness in the application of statistical techniques might be at least partly explained by the fact that statistical textbooks for psychology and related sciences are conservative as well. Most of them discuss at length basic concepts of probability, scales of measurement and hypothesis testing, and then offer step-by-step explanations of procedures, such as the calculation of a t test. The aim is undoubtedly to make the logic underlying the application of statistics as clear as possible, at least intuitively, which is an important undertaking. However, it comes at a certain cost: there is little or no space left for introducing modern or more advanced techniques.
As an introduction to statistics, Baayen's book differs importantly from a typical textbook. It is intended to provide a radically practical course of using statistical techniques in psycholinguistic analyses. To that end, the author has chosen a number of real-world, published studies...