#168 Speech Perception & Multilevel Models, with Santiago Barreda
1 hr 26 min
Support & Resources → Support the show on Patreon → Bayesian Modeling Course (first 2 lessons free) Our theme music is « Good Bayesian », by Baba Brinkman (feat MC Lars and Mega Ran). Check out his awesome work! Takeaways: Q: Why would a linguist switch from lme4 to Bayesian multilevel models? A: For Santiago, it was purely practical. Mixed-effects models fit with lme4 kept failing to converge, and they couldn't handle the complex repeated-measures structures his experiments needed. His friend Noah Silbert got him into Bayesian modeling around 2015, and only afterwards did he realize he agreed with the philosophy too. His analogy: the frequentist toolbox is a furniture store, and if it doesn't sell the bed you need, you settle for the nearest one; Bayesian modeling teaches you carpentry, so the model can match what you believe is going on in your data instead of squeezing the data into a standard structure. Q: Why teach Bayesian multilevel models before t-tests and ANOVA? A: Because in linguistics essentially all data are repeated measures: listeners judge hundreds of trials, and speakers produce many tokens. Yet students traditionally spend a year or more on one-sample t-tests, paired t-tests and ANOVAs they will never use in their own research. Santiago's book jumps straight to the multilevel version of the simplest case, a one-group model with many observations per listener, which he finds no harder to grasp than a t-test since there are no reference distributions or degrees of freedom to explain. Q: Do Bayesian and frequentist analyses give different results on typical phonetics data? A: With analogous models, largely no, at least with the amount of data phonetics experiments usually have. That's why the early chapters of Santiago's book end with a comparison to the equivalent frequentist analysis, to reassure readers. His rule of thumb: if you get dramatically different results, something has probably gone wrong. The gain from going Bayesian is not different p...