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> Getting rid of the nuisance-main effect is nice. That is one of the > hopes of doing the re-parameterization by standardizing by syllable. > Did that work? No the main effect of syntactic complexity stayed there after conversion from overall sentence duration to syll/sec. Maybe because of a constant factor. This is not a big deal, though. The main objective was to be better able to compare groups across levels of the within group complexity factor. The drawback of using syll/sec as the DV is that I have to go into issues of defining syllables, which is pretty hard. > The problem with the z-scores is that it is ad-hoc, and it could > be defined several ways (how many z-scores?), and it complicates > the explanation. Yes, it is a little hard to explain how the z-scores were obtained. What is the correct vocabulary to use? If I were to revert to z-scores, does the following explanation make sense?: "The raw scores for each level of the repeated measures were transformed to z-scores centered on the mean across groups." I want to communicate that for each of the repeated measures the z-scores were based on the scores for both groups. > I wonder if there are 'pauses' that might interfere with solving > the syllable length problem. No pauses were avoided by having participants repeat every time they produced a sentence with some sort of disfluency. The main problem is defining syll/sec, because sometimes people skip a syllable (words like "little", "suppose", and "police" are regularly produced as monosyllabic words) and sometimes they ad one (e.g., epenthetic schwa in Spanish speakers pronunciation of "(e-)school" or "(e-)Spanish". However skipping of adding a syllable is not an either-or phenomenon, but rather a continuum.
