Abstract
We present a state-trace analysis of sentence ratings elicited by asking participants to evaluate the overall acceptability of a sentence and those elicited by asking participants to focus on structural well-formedness only. Appealing to literature on “grammatical illusion” sentences, we anticipated that a simple instruction manipulation might prompt people to apply qualitatively different kinds of judgment in the two conditions. Although differences consistent with the subjective experience of grammatical illusion dissociations were observed, the state trace analysis of the rating data indicates that responses were still consistent with both judgment types accessing a single underlying factor. These results add to the existing comparisons between analytic and probabilistic modeling approaches to predicting rating judgments.
Highlights
Language communities have been shown to be consistent and reliable in their consensus reporting of how acceptable a sentence is (Sprouse et al, 2013; Mahowald et al, 2016)
Unlike the other stimuli considered here, none of these sentences have been claimed to produce “illusions” directly dissociating the acceptability and grammatical status of any single item. We considered it possible that the apparent conflict between the pattern conforming/violating status of these examples and their crowd-sourced acceptability scores is that the two reflect different kinds of judgment
Response to Instructions A natural first question is whether the instruction manipulation produced any difference in responding at all
Summary
Language communities have been shown to be consistent and reliable in their consensus reporting of how acceptable a sentence is (Sprouse et al, 2013; Mahowald et al, 2016). The most popular view is that acceptability is a combination of error signals from all these sources, which could include processing effort and word co-occurrence statistics as salient signals (Sprouse, 2018). From this general perspective, a full understanding of acceptability ratings would entail describing the factor structure of linguistic acceptability and specifying how the different components interact
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