Hi,
I’m doing a project in school where we’re comparing entropy rates for how high the freedom of word order in a language is, to number of speakers. Our idea is that lower number of speakers would lead to an increased freedom/complexity in word order.
We’re comparing these 2 variables with Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. But I don’t understand how it works. If we get a result that is closer to -1, as I understand it, that would mean that if 1 of the variables decreases, then the other one decreases aswell.
And as I understand that then, that would mean that a strong leaning towards -1 would indicate that smaller amount of people would correlate with lower freedom of word ordet? But that doesn’t make sense.
Am I getting something wrong?
In: 1
If your two variables are “freedom of word order” and “number of speakers”, your rank-correlation coefficient would tell you:
* For a coefficient near +1, languages that are highly ranked in one are highly ranked in the other. That is, more free word order correlates with more speakers.
* For a coefficient near 0, there’s little relationship between the two, at least in terms of ranking.
* For a coefficient near -1, highly-ranked items in one are **lowly** ranked in the other. In other words, highly order-free languages are *less* spoken, and highly spoken languages are less order-free.
This is similar behavior to the more familiar Pearson (“r”) correlation coefficient, it just doesn’t depend on there being a linear relationship.
Latest Answers