A brief introduction to regression designs and mixed-effects

Abstract

This article discusses the advantages of multiple regression designs over the factorial designs traditionally used in many psycholinguistic experiments. It is shown that regression designs are typically more informative, statistically more powerful and better suited to the analysis of naturalistic tasks. The advantages of including both fixed and random effects are demonstrated with reference to linear mixed-effects models, and problems of collinearity, variable distribution and variable selection are discussed. The advantages of these techniques are exemplified in an analysis of a word recognition experiment in Danish.