I won't bother getting into another point/counter-point quote-fest... I'm not a mathematician, so I can't speak authoritatively on the methods they used. All I can say is that throwing 40% of the trials for no other reason than them not supporting your hypothesis is silly, and any amount of statistics you run the remaining results through to support your hypothesis is going to be overshadowed by that.
I also note that they threw out the word 'camera' from the list because the bird was saying it so often (due to cameras being used in the experiment). Wouldn't this effect have been cancelled out by the random permutation analysis which you claim does compare the hits against a baseline? Why throw it out if the bird's baseline speech patterns are already accounted for in the post-analysis? How do we know there aren't other words that the bird was using frequently enough to also warrant being thrown out (perhaps "flower," which accounted for almost half of the hits used in the final analysis)?  |