An introduction to GAM(M)s

Software pre-requisites

Please, have the following software installed on your laptop.

• R (latest version): https://www.r-project.org
  • If for other software constraints reasons you cannot upgrade to the latest version, anything > 3.3.3 should work
• RStudio (latest version): https://posit.co/downloads/
• The following R packages, available on CRAN:
  • tidyverse
  • mgcv
• The following package available on GitHub (install the development version)
  • tidygam: https://github.com/stefanocoretta/tidygam

Be sure to update all of your other R packages.

Slides

Slides can be found at https://stefanocoretta.github.io/gamm-workshop/slides/.

Further GAM resources

I strongly recommend the following tutorials:

• Sóskuthy, Márton. 2017. Generalised additive mixed models for dynamic analysis in linguistics: a practical introduction. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1703.05339
• Sóskuthy, Márton. 2021. Evaluating generalised additive mixed modelling strategies for dynamic speech analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2020.101017
• Pedersen, Eric et al. 2019. Hierarchical generalized additive models in ecology: an introduction with mgcv. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6876

See also:

• Tamminga, Meredith et al. 2016. Generalized additive mixed models for intraspeaker variation. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0030
• Winter, Bodo et al. 2016. How to analyze linguistic change using mixed models, growth curve analysis and generalized additive modeling. https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzv003
• Wieling, Martijn. 2018. Analyzing dynamic phonetic data using generalized additive mixed modeling: a tutorial focusing on articulatory differences between L1 and L2 speakers of English. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0095447017301377

These are further online tutorials.

• Noam, Ross. GAMs in R: A free, interactive course using mgcv. https://noamross.github.io/gams-in-r-course/
• Clark, Michael. Generalised Additive Models. https://m-clark.github.io/generalized-additive-models/

If you have an undergraduate degree in maths or similar:

• Wood, Simon. 2017. Generalized additive models: an introduction with R. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/9781315370279/generalized-additive-models-simon-wood

Linguistics papers that use GAMs:

• Coretta, Stefano. 2020. Longer vowel duration correlates with greater tongue root advancement at vowel offset: acoustic and articulatory data from Italian and Polish.. https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/10.0000556
• Cameron-Faulkner, Thea et al. 2020. A cross-cultural analysis of early prelinguistic gesture development and its relationship to language development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13406.
• Oschkinat, Miriam et al. 2020. Compensation to real-time temporal auditory feedback perturbation depends on syllable position. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0001765
• Los, Bettelou et al. Under review. The decline of local anchoring: A quantitative investigation.
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