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On 7 Jun 2004, Anders D Hojen wrote: > 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. I would bet that you would get very highly correlated measures if you defined length as number of characters, number of syllables, or number of words, and that making time relative to any of these indices would produce similar results. But then I'm not an expert in this area. > > 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 would discard the whole idea of z-scores. You seem to be introducing a complexity that buys you nothing, which is seldom a good idea unless you want to make it more difficult for the reader/reviewer. > > 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. I trust you kept track of the number of such repetitions. I'm not sure what "sense" it makes to compare duration of utterances that were repeated several times with utterances that were produced only once. Repetition must have a marked effect on duration, and could easily be confounded with your factors (e.g., complex utterances being repeated more often). 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 ============================================================================
