Hi On 2 Jun 2004, Anders D Hojen wrote: > I'm measuring sentence durations to follow up studies on the seemingly > trivial fact that non-native speakers tend to speak more slowly than > native speakers. I'm trying to find the psycholinguistic locus (or loci) > of their slowness. The hypothesis I'm testing is that that locus is > syntactical processing. The between-groups factor is 'group' (native vs. > non-native). The within-group factor is 'syntactic complexity' of the > sentences that the subjects repeated (3 levels). > > In an ANOVA on the raw data, the interaction was significant, and I > found that the mean group difference was not significant for the simple > sentences, but for the complex sentences. Thus, I might infer that > increased syntactic processing load slows non-native talkers down. > > However, syntactic complexity is confounded with sentence length, > because the more complex the syntax of a sentence gets (i.e., the more > words there are), the longer it inevitably gets. The group differences
Standardization per se will not do anything about the problem of sentence length. I thinks what you want is a rate measure rather than a duration measure. Perhaps something like words per second (or seconds per word). To do properly, this will involve going back to the raw data and for each trial, computing #words/duration (or the inverse if you prefer a seconds per word measure). Unfortunately, ratios of means do not equal means of ratios when the denominators change (the denominators being either duration or #words, dedending on which measure you adopt). You might get a rough idea of what the results would look like, however, by dividing your mean durations for each complexity level by the mean length of the respective sentence type (or again the inverse). If your raw data was collected by computer, then you hopefully have a file that indicates duration and which sentence the person was processing (or even better its length). Best wishes Jim ============================================================================ James M. Clark (204) 786-9757 Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax University of Winnipeg 4L05D Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED] CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark ============================================================================ . . ================================================================ This list will soon be replaced by the new list EDSTAT-L at Penn State. Please subscribe to the new list using the web interface at http://lists.psu.edu/archives/edstat-l.html. ================================================================
