Social, geographical, and lexical influences on dialectical pronunciations in Dutch

Abstract

Wieling, Nerbonne, en Baayen (2011) performed a quantitative social dialectological study explaining social, lexical, and geographical effect on linguistic variation of different Dutch pronunciations. They combined generalized additive modeling (GAM) with mixed-effect regression models to analyze the data. When they implemented this method in programming language R they couldn’t analyze the dataset in one time because of the big size of the data. What they did instead was first using generalized additive models and then applying mixed models with the result from GAM. At this moment (2013), there is a new alternative of implementing this in R with a function called bam. The aim of this research is to applying this new method to their study and also looking for possible improvements in their methodology.