Abstract
Acceptability judgments have been an important tool in language research. By asking a native speaker whether a linguistic token is acceptable, linguists and psycholinguists can collect negative evidence and directly test predictions by linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, which provide important insight into the human language capacity. In this paper, we first give a brief overview of this method including: (1) the linking hypothesis for this method, (2) the controversy about the test, and (3) limitations of the current analysis of the results. Then, we propose a new way of analyzing the data: Signal Detection Theory. Signal Detection Theory has been used in many other psychological research areas such as recognition memory and clinical assessments. In this paper, using two examples, we show how Signal Detection Theory can be applied to judgment data. The benefits of this approach are that it can: (1) show how well participants can differentiate the acceptable sentences from unacceptable ones and (2) describe the participant’s bias in the judgment. We conclude with a discussion of remaining questions and future directions.
Highlights
In this paper, using two examples, we show how Signal Detection Theory can be applied to judgment data
In the sections “Signal Detection Theory and One-Factor-Design Experiments” and “Signal Detection Theory and Two-Factor-Design Experiments,” we provide two examples of the application of SDT to acceptability judgment
We first discussed why acceptability judgments can be a useful tool for language research, and we considered the reliability of the method
Summary
One important type of linguistic data comes from judgments of the well-formedness of linguistic stimuli. To assess whether the unaccusative and unergative conditions are perceived differently, we can calculate the overall sensitivity and bias based on the collective judgments This means that we ignore individual differences across items and participants. We have no evidence that the participants discriminated the unaccusative and unergative stimuli in the control condition This is consistent with our expectations, since the verb+noun sequence was predicted to be acceptable for both verb types. The results show that participants were able to discriminate unaccusative and unergative verbs in the prenominal participle form, and this ability is not confounded with any semantic and pragmatic differences, since the verbs were not distinguished in the control condition. The larger average d’ in the unergative condition means that the unergative condition is less acceptable than the unaccusative condition
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