[R-lang] Re: analysis of acceptability judgements

[Antti Arppe]

Hi all,

On Fri, 15 Oct 2010, T. Florian Jaeger wrote:
> If you're looking for in discussions of acceptability judgments as a
> a method, I'd agree that Carson's work is a good start, as well as
> Cowart 1997's book "Empirical Syntax" (mostly on acceptability
> judgments), Frank Keller's thesis on magnitude estimation, as well
> as several papers he had with collaborators like Ash Asudeh and
> Antonella Sorace in the early 2000s. Several of these papers discuss
> trade-offs between magnitude estimation and likert scale or binary
> judgments in depth. These papers (and the development of the WebExp2
> software) also triggered a lot of cross-linguistic work, including
> methodological comparisons (a small sample can be seen
> here http://www.language-experiments.org/, under "previous
> experiments"). There's also been a bit of work on speeded
> grammaticality judgments (I believe Fanselow is one of the people
> who worked on this, Meng and Bader, and others). I am mostly
> mentioning this because this earlier work (e.g. by Cowart, and Frank
> and colleagues) is often less known to theoretical linguists.

Specifically comparing different variations of acceptability
judgments, a paper of interest might be Weskott & Fanselow (2009),
based on a presentation at the 2008 Linguistic Evidence Conference -
their basic conclusion, if I recall correctly, is that in the end
binary/categorical, Likert/graded, and continuous
(magnitude-estimation) judgments all effectively produce the same
results. At the same conference, there was a poster by Murphy & Vogel
(2008) presenting quite a similar result (my understanding was that it
was based on Murphy's dissertation).

REFERENCES:

Thomas Weskott &  Gisbert Fanselow 2009. Scaling issues in the
measurement of linguistic acceptability. The Fruits of. Empirical
Linguistics. Volume 1: Process. Edited by. Sam Featherston. Susanne
Winkler. Mouton de Gruyter. Berlin · New York

Brian Murphy & Carl Vogel 2008. An Empirical Comparison of Measurement
Scales for Judgements of Linguistic Acceptability. Pre-Proceeding of
the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence 2008, University
of Tübingen, Germany, 31.1.-1.2.2008.
http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/LingEvid2008/abstracts/Murphy.pdf

Best regards,

	-Antti
-- 
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Antti Arppe - Ph.D (General Linguistics), M.Sc. (Engineering)
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (General Linguistics, Univ. of Helsinki)
Visiting Researcher (Dep't of Linguistics, Univ. of Alberta)
E-mail: antti.arppe@helsinki.fi, antti.arppe@ualberta.ca
WWW: http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~aarppe
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