Judgment and Interpretation Tasks in Second Language Research

Abstract

This article provides an overview of recent studies in second language acquisition that use tasks that elicit learners' judgments about the grammaticality of language or learners' interpretation of language. We discuss acceptability judgment tasks, preference tasks, truth-value judgment tasks, and other types of interpretation tasks. For each task type, recent studies that use that task are briefly summarized, with a focus on advantages and disadvantages of the methodology in relation to the study's objectives. A variety of topics related to task administration are covered, including (but not limited to) different types of rating scales; presentation of target sentences in isolation versus in the context of other sentences, stories, and/or pictures; visual versus auditory modality of presentation; and timed versus untimed tasks.