Vincent Porretta, University of Alberta

The use of the R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics has recently increased in the fields of linguistics and psychology. A likely reason for this increase is R’s power and flexibility in handling large datasets, computing complex statistics, and producing customizable, publication-quality plots. Through hands-on experience, this course will provide participants with a step-by-step, basic introduction to using R, which will culminate in the computation of a mixed-effects linear regression model. Utilizing a real datasets, participants will learn to load the data, check and transform its format, compute simple descriptive and inferential statistics, produce simple plots, and compute (and interpret) basic mixed-effects linear model.  Through this process participants will discover typical issues that often arise and simple solutions that will lead to more confident usage of R for statistics and plotting. While there are no prerequisites, it would be good to have a grasp of basic statistical concepts. It would be helpful for participants to bring their own laptop for use in this course.