Learning Statistics with R - A tutorial for psychology students and other beginners, 2018a

who()
-- Name -- -- Class -- -- Size --
speaker character 10
speech.by.char list 3
utterance character 10
Now we use the importList() function to copy all of the variables within the speech.by.char list:
> importList( speech.by.char )
Names of variables to be created:
[1] "makka.pakka" "tombliboo" "upsy.daisy"
Create these variables? [y/n]
Because the importList() function is attempting to create new variables based on the names of the
elements of the list, it pauses to check that you’re okay with the variable names. The reason it does this
is that, if one of the to-be-created variables has the same name as a variable that you already have in
your workspace, that variable will end up being overwritten, so it’s a good idea to check. Assuming that
you type y, it will go on to create the variables. Nothing appears to have happened, but if we look at our
workspace now:
> who()
-- Name -- -- Class -- -- Size --
makka.pakka character 4
speaker character 10
speech.by.char list 3
tombliboo character 2
upsy.daisy character 4
utterance character 10
we see that there are three new variables, called makka.pakka, tombliboo and upsy.daisy. Notice that the
importList() function has converted the original character strings into valid R variable names, so the
variable corresponding to "makka-pakka" is actually makka.pakka. 10 Nevertheless, even though the names
can change, note that each of these variables contains the exact same information as the original elements
of the list did. For example:
> makka.pakka
[1] "pip" "pip" "onk" "onk"
7.5
Extracting a subset of a data frame
In this section we turn to the question of how to subset a data frame rather than a vector. To that end,
the first thing I should point out is that, if all you want to do is subset one of the variables inside the
data frame, then as usual the $ operator is your friend. For instance, suppose I’m working with the itng
data frame, and what I want to do is create the speech.by.char list. I can use the exact same tricks
that I used last time, since what I really want to do is split() the itng$utterance vector, using the
itng$speaker vector as the grouping variable. However, most of the time what you actually want to do
10 You can do this yourself using the make.names() function. In fact, this is itself a handy thing to know about. For
example, if you want to convert the names of the variables in the speech.by.char list into valid R variable names, you could
use a command like this: names(speech.by.char)