[R-lang] Grammaticality judgments

[Ambridge, Ben]

Dear All

I'm new to this mailing list, but a colleague pointed me in the direction of the recent discussion of Likert-scale-type grammaticality judgments. In the past couple of years, I've published several papers using a graded grammaticality judgment task (5-point scale) with adults and children, so wanted to add my perspective.

Whilst I accept all the previously-raised shortcomings of this method in principle, in practice, if a graded judgment task produces a pattern of judgments that is (a) entirely consistent with the predictions of relevant linguistic theories and (b) corroborated by findings from other paradigms (e.g., elicited production, spontaneous speech), I feel that we can be confident that the task is measuring something useful, even if we don't know precisely what that is. All my papers analyse the graded-judgment data using ANOVA or regression (lmer) and yielded a pattern of results that made sense in terms of the theories under investigation and the data obtained using other paradigms (and - from a pragmatic perspective - no reviewer or editor has ever objected to this analysis). Of course, a magnitude estimation task is preferable where this is possible, but my studies mainly focus on children, for whom a simpler task is required.

I've also written a book chapter on the paradigm that I hope some may find interesting and/or useful. It - and the papers mentioned above - can be downloaded from http://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~ambridge/Downloadable%20Publications.htm

Ben Ambridge
University of Liverpool


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