The effect of three basic task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment tasks
Open Access
- 3 January 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Open Library of the Humanities in Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics
- Vol. 5 (1)
- https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.980
Abstract
Sprouse and Almeida (2017) provide a first systematic investigation of the sensitivity of four acceptability judgment tasks. In this project, we build on these results by decomposing those tasks into three constituent task features (single versus joint presentation, number of response options, and use of response labels), and explore the consequences of those task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment experiments. We present 6 additional experiments (for a total of 10) designed to probe the effect of those task features on sensitivity, both independently and in combination. Our results suggest three notable conclusions: (i) there is a clear advantage to joint presentation of theoretically-related sentence types, regardless of the type of response scale used in the experiment; (ii) tasks involving a continuous slider (which have an infinite number of response options, and few labels) offer good sensitivity, while relying solely on spatial reasoning rather than numeric reasoning; and (iii) there are a number of subtle interactions among the three task features that may warrant further investigation. We discuss the potential benefits and concerns of each of these features in detail, along with the relevance of these findings for deciding how to investigate both simple and higher-order acceptability contrasts.This publication has 17 references indexed in Scilit:
- Interpreting numerals and scalar items under memory loadLingua, 2013
- Assessing the reliability of textbook data in syntax: Adger'sCore SyntaxJournal of Linguistics, 2012
- On the Informativity of Different Measures of Linguistic AcceptabilityLanguage, 2011
- A Test of the Cognitive Assumptions of Magnitude Estimation: Commutativity does not Hold for Acceptability JudgmentsLanguage, 2011
- Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar ImplicaturesJournal of Semantics, 2011
- Toward a model of grammaticality judgmentsJournal of Linguistics, 2009
- Bayesian t tests for accepting and rejecting the null hypothesisPsychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2009
- Magnitude estimation and what it can do for your syntax: some wh-constraints in GermanLingua, 2005
- Magnitude Estimation of Linguistic AcceptabilityLanguage, 1996
- Statistical Power AnalysisCurrent Directions in Psychological Science, 1992