On Monday, I continued searching for tutorials that would teach me how to use Python to manipulate Excel spreadsheets. Finding only few materials online helpful, I struggled for most of the day to figure out the basics. By the end of the day, I was able to create and format a new spreadsheet.
On Tuesday, I was learning how to read exisiting Excel spreadsheets. Because creating and reading Excel files require different libraries, I had to get used to the slightly different commands. As Zhenghan asked me to do, I wanted to add a column for the Subject ID to each spreadsheet. But again, editting existing Excel files require a different library, I was not sure how to convert to xlwt(editting) from xlrd(reading).
On Wednesday, Zhenghan was the speaker for our undergraduate/high school students weekly reading group. Her presentation focused mainly on ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and why it is important to learn more about the disorder. She discussed the ongoing experiments regarding the language deficiency among ASD patients. Most of the studies done on Autism are still inconclusive, which made the topic more interesting. After much struggle that afternoon, I was able to come up with a script, but strange error kept occurring so I decided to seek Michelle's help. Michelle and I wrestled with Python for almost an hour, and we were finally able to fix the problem. When we opened the spreadsheet with xlrd and then copied the file with xlrt, we were able to write on the existing spreadsheet.
Finally on Thursday, I was able to write a script for overall average response time for each subject and add those numbers to the mastersheet. I was even able to write another script to find the overall average duration for each syllable group, which yielded quite strange results. In contrary to my previous assumption, the data showed that the longer the word lesser time it took for the subjects to respond. The difference between the average duration for two syllables and five syllables was about 0.08 seconds. After much thought as to why this was the case, I hypothesized that it must be because when subjects are presented with a longer word, knowing that they have limited time to respond, they rush not to get their responses cut off by the next scanner noise. Now the only task left was to find the average response time for each syllable group in each subjects.
On Friday, by noon, I was able to complete my task by adding numerous if statements to get average response time for each syllable group in individual subjects. I sent Zhenghan the finished products for her to look at. Impressed by my work, Zhenghan asked me to meet with her on Monday to go over plotting the data.
What my script looks like:
Basic overview of my project (from Anna's PowerPoint):
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