Acceptability Judgment Experiments Research Articles

On the Island Sensitivity of Topicalization in Norwegian: An Experimental Investigation

Mainland Scandinavian languages have been reported to allow movement from embedded questions, relative clauses, and complex NPs—domains commonly considered to be islands crosslinguistically. Yet in formal acceptability studies Scandinavian participants often show ‘island effects’: they reject island-violating movement similarly to native speakers of ‘island-sensitive’ languages. To investigate this apparent mismatch between informal and formal judgments, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments testing the acceptability of topicalization from various island domains in Norwegian. We were interested in determining whether we could (i) find evidence for island insensitivity and (ii) pin down the source of qualitatively different island effects. We asked whether such effects are best explained as reflecting violations of a uniform syntactic constraint or extrasyntactic factors. Our results suggest that embedded questions and relative clauses are not uniform syntactic islands for topicalization, but complex NPs are. Unexpectedly, we also found evidence suggesting that conditional adjunct clauses may not be islands.

A processing-based account of subliminal wh-island effects

Wh-island effects are notorious for their cross-linguistic variation. However, experimental syntax studies observed super-additive wh-island effects in some languages which were previously argued to be immune to them. In four acceptability judgment experiments, we investigate the origin of super-additivity in acceptable wh-islands, so-called “subliminal island effects,” focusing on Hebrew. Our first experiment reveals a super-additive wh-island effect in Hebrew. However, we suggest that the super-additivity measure for wh-islands is contaminated by processing factors. Specifically, we propose that in this case, the decrease in acceptability reflects interference caused by the simultaneous maintenance of two dependencies, rather than grammatical islandhood. The following experiments demonstrate that super-additivity can be observed in binding structures, where it cannot be attributed to a violation of a grammatical constraint, but rather to processing costs related to interference for maintenance processes. We also show that when minimizing these costs, super-additivity does not emerge in Hebrew wh-islands. We conclude that processing costs underlie the apparent wh-island effect in Hebrew, and perhaps in additional languages, and that the super-additivity paradigm should be fine-tuned in order to avoid these confounds.

The nominative/accusative alternation in Japanese and information structure

In Japanese, desiderative (and potential) predicates derived from transitive verbs allow their direct object to be marked with the nominative marker ga, instead of the expected accusative marker o. This article argues that the nominative/accusative alternation in a desiderative construction has an information-structural implication. Nominative-marking on the object indicates its focushood, i.e., that it is either the focus of the utterance or part thereof, whereas accusative-marking has no such information-structural bearing. This claim is motivated by the observation that the direct object of a desiderative predicate resists nominative-marking when it is not adjacent to the predicate (“adjacency effect”). Under our account, the adjacency effect can be regarded as a variety of the garden-path effect, stemming from the discrepancy between the default (expected) locus of the focus and the pragmatic information conveyed by nominative-marking. With three sets of experimental data (from two acceptability judgment experiments with written stimuli and one rating experiment with auditory stimuli), we demonstrate that (i) the adjacency effect is real, and (ii) it can be mitigated by prosodic or contextual cues signaling the focushood of the object. The second finding conforms well to our hypothesis that the adjacency effect is a processing-based phenomenon, rather than a reflection of a purely syntactic constraint.

Frisian strong and weak verbs in the face of Dutch influence: a synchronic and experimental approach

Like other Germanic languages, Frisian has both strong and weak verbal inflection. Despite a strong diachronic tendency for change towards weak inflection, strong inflection patterns are available synchronically to speakers to form the past tense and past participle of new or nonce verbs. Using a measure for ‘potential productivity’ developed by Knooihuizen and Strik (Folia Linguist Hist 35:173–200, 2014) for Dutch, we investigate the relative strength of available patterns in Frisian in an elicitation and an acceptability judgment experiment. Despite the multitude of different patterns in the strong verbal inflection system, strong inflection makes up 35% of the elicited nonce forms; these forms cannot all be explained by analogy. Analogically formed strong inflections of nonce verbs receive relatively high acceptability ratings at 4.2 on a 7-point scale. The elicitation experiment also produced many weak forms (12% of participles) that are not normatively possible with the -e infinitives in the elicitation prompt. These alternative weak forms were not included in the acceptability judgment experiment. We discuss the experimental results in the context of diachronically attested language change in Frisian and of intensive language contact with Dutch.

Morphosyntactic form of Korean fragments is relevant to their resolution

We offer evidence for a structural identity constraint between a fragment and the structurally parallel position in the antecedent (which we term correspondent here). We ask if there is a preference for morphosyntactic match (generally in terms of syntactic category, but in terms of case marking in the Korean data discussed here) between a fragment and its correspondent. This question follows from the idea that in order to interpret fragments, the parser directly accesses content-addressable representations stored in memory, using as retrieval cues the linguistic information that fragments provide. We explore this preference using experimental data from Korean. In three acceptability judgment experiments, we demonstrate that (1) morphosyntactic match between fragments and correspondents is favored over mismatch, (2) the acceptability of mismatch is directional, favoring fragments that are morphosyntactically less complex than correspondents over the reverse, and (3) caseless fragments are degraded when paired with implicit correspondents compared to explicit ones.

Focus in heritage Hungarian

ABSTRACTBilinguals have been shown to differ from monolinguals especially in the realization and interpretation of phenomena that operate at the syntax/discourse interface. Hungarian has a well-known interface structure—identificational focus—which has been widely studied in the theoretical literature but never with bilinguals. The present article fills that gap, using three acceptability judgment experiments to test the realization and interpretation of identificational focus by heritage speakers and L1-dominant native speakers of Hungarian. The results reveal that both groups pattern similarly, showing some vulnerability at the syntax/discourse interface with regard to focus interpretation but less so with its realization. Further, the findings bear on the description of Hungarian focus in the theoretical literature, providing experimental evidence that focus is realized preverbally and that its interpretation is the result of a pragmatic implicature rather than part of the sentence’s semantics.

Effects of Aging on Interference During Pronoun Resolution.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of healthy aging on the ability to suppress grammatically illicit antecedents during pronoun resolution. In 2 reading-based acceptability-judgment experiments, younger and older speakers of German read sentences containing an object pronoun and 2 potential antecedent noun phrases, only 1 of which was a grammatically licit antecedent. Using a gender-mismatch paradigm, we compared to what extent younger and older speakers were sensitive to feature (mis)matches between the pronoun and either of the 2 antecedents. All participants were fluent readers of German and had finished at least secondary education. Experiment 1 used a self-paced reading paradigm. Older speakers showed greater sensitivity than younger ones to mismatching licit antecedents, but no group showed any evidence of interference from an intervening competitor antecedent. In Experiment 2, we increased the processing demand by using paced word-by-word stimulus presentation and longer sentences. Here, older participants showed reduced sensitivity, in comparison with younger people, to mismatching licit antecedents. Unlike our younger participants, they showed signs of distraction by the presence of a linearly closer but grammatically inappropriate antecedent when no appropriate antecedent was available. Together, our results show that older (but not younger) speakers' ability to compute intrasentential referential dependencies is vulnerable to increased task demands. We briefly discuss a potential role for executive functions, such as interference control.

Split intransitivity in Japanese is syntactic: Evidence for the Unaccusative Hypothesis from sentence acceptability and truth value judgment experiments

Split intransitivity (SI) is the generalization that intransitive verbs form two subclasses: the subjects of some intransitives behave like direct objects of transitive verbs, whereas the subjects of other intransitives behave like transitive subjects. The Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH) accounts for SI syntactically, arguing that the subjects of some intransitives (unaccusatives) are initially internal arguments, just like transitive objects, while the subjects of other intransitives (unergatives) are true subjects, just like transitive subjects. The UH has been enormously influential and inspired a rich and diverse literature on SI, including many recent experimental studies. Yet, no conclusive evidence for or against the UH has been put forward, largely because SI diagnostics (SIDs) – phenomena that motivate SI – are often amenable to both syntactic and non-syntactic analyses. In order to present unequivocal evidence for the UH, therefore, SIDs that make crucial reference to the UH must be carefully identified and studied. This study argues that two Japanese SIDs, quantifier scope and floating numeral quantifier licensing (FNQ-licensing), are such SIDs, as (i) they make crucial reference to the UH and the putative syntactic difference between unaccusative and unergative subjects, and (ii) they reliably classify Japanese intransitive verbs into two subclasses because of a syntactic difference. The evidence for this claim comes from the results of truth value judgment and sentence acceptability judgment experiments. The study argues that the results of these experiments show that Japanese intransitive verbs form two subclasses because of a syntactic difference, supporting the UH.

The distribution and variation of non-coordinated pronoun case forms in English

This paper investigates case preferences for English pronouns in non-coordinated environments subject to variation: in isolation and after not, with following numeral, PP, and NP modifiers, in than and as comparatives, and as the foci of it-clefts. It uses an acceptability judgment experiment (Mechanical Turk) and corpus study (COCA) to investigate these preferences and presents an Optimality Theory-style analysis based on their results that models structural case assignment (case from an external head), default case, and prescriptivism as competing constraints. This model captures case preferences and their relative strengths and provides one possible explanation for the variation attested in these environments.

Sonority Sequencing in Polish: the Combined Roles of Prior Bias & Experience

A growing body of behavioral results demonstrates cross-linguistic sensitivity to the SSP (Daland et al. 2011; Berent et al. 2007; Berent et al. 2008; Jarosz to appear; Ren, Gao & Morgan 2010). These consistent findings suggest a role for prior bias in phonological learning, but recent modeling studies question this conclusion, showing that for some languages these preferences can be derived from the input (Daland et al. 2011; Hayes 2011). Building on these results and Jarosz’s (to appear) developmental findings for Polish, the present paper investigates adult Polish speakers’ sensitivity to the SSP experimentally and computationally. We report the results of an online acceptability judgment experiment focusing on initial clusters and present the results of computational simulations evaluating the ability of phonotactic models to predict participants’ ratings on the basis of the lexical statistics of Polish. Our main findings are that 1) SSP is predictive of adults’ ratings, 2) sonority projection arises in both attested and unattested clusters, 3) while phonotactic models have significant predictive value, they do not subsume the SSP preferences observed in the participants’ ratings, and 4) participants’ sonority sequencing preferences are not entirely compatible with the SSP, suggesting a combined effect of prior bias and experience.

Design sensitivity and statistical power in acceptability judgment experiments

Previous investigations into the validity of acceptability judgment data have focused almost exclusively on type I errors (or false positives) because of the consequences of such errors for syntactic theories (Sprouse & Almeida 2012; Sprouse et al. 2013). The current study complements these previous studies by systematically investigating the type II error rate (false negatives), or equivalently, the statistical power, of a wide cross-section of possible acceptability judgment experiments. Though type II errors have historically been assumed to be less costly than type I errors, the dynamics of scientific publishing mean that high type II error rates (i.e., studies with low statistical power) can lead to increases in type I error rates in a given field of study. We present a set of experiments and resampling simulations to estimate statistical power for four tasks (forced-choice, Likert scale, magnitude estimation, and yes-no), 50 effect sizes instantiated by real phenomena, sample sizes from 5 to 100 participants, and two approaches to statistical analysis (null hypothesis and Bayesian). Our goals are twofold (i) to provide a fuller picture of the status of acceptability judgment data in syntax, and (ii) to provide detailed information that syntacticians can use to design and evaluate the sensitivity of acceptability judgment experiments in their own research.

Which noun phrases is the verb supposed to agree with?: Object agreement in American English

We investigate a noncanonical agreement pattern in American English in which a fronted wh-phrase appears to control agreement on an inflected auxiliary, as in Which flowers are the gardener planting? (Kimball & Aissen 1971). We explore this phenomenon with five acceptability-judgment experiments and interpret the resulting data with the aid of a quantitative model of the judgment process. Our study suggests that fronted wh-phrases interfere with agreement primarily as a function of their linear and structural position, and that this effect is not significantly modulated by overt case or thematic cues in off-line judgments. We suggest that our findings support a model of agreement processing in which syntactic phrases compete to control agreement on the basis of their structural and linear position with respect to the inflected verb.

Negative polarity illusions and the format of hierarchical encodings in memory

Linguistic illusions have provided valuable insights into how we mentally navigate complex representations in memory during language comprehension. Two notable cases involve illusory licensing of agreement and negative polarity items (NPIs), where comprehenders fleetingly accept sentences with unlicensed agreement or an unlicensed NPI, but judge those same sentences as unacceptable after more reflection. Existing accounts have argued that illusions are a consequence of faulty memory access processes, and make the additional assumption that the encoding of the sentence remains fixed over time. This paper challenges the predictions made by these accounts, which assume that illusions should generalize to a broader set of structural environments and a wider range of syntactic and semantic phenomena. We show across seven reading-time and acceptability judgment experiments that NPI illusions can be reliably switched “on” and “off”, depending on the amount of time from when the potential licensor is processed until the NPI is encountered. But we also find that the same profile does not extend to agreement illusions. This contrast suggests that the mechanisms responsible for switching the NPI illusion on and off are not shared across all illusions. We argue that the contrast reflects changes over time in the encoding of the semantic/pragmatic representations that can license NPIs. Just as optical illusions have been informative about the visual system, selective linguistic illusions are informative not only about the nature of the access mechanisms, but also about the nature of the encoding mechanisms.

Floating numeral quantifiers as an unaccusative diagnostic in native, heritage, and L2 Japanese speakers

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the knowledge of unaccusativity in Japanese native, heritage, and second/foreign language speakers with respect to licensing of floating numeral quantifiers (FNQs) by unaccusative and unergative subjects (the FNQ diagnostic). Two acceptability judgment experiments were conducted to examine (i) whether and how judgments of the three populations differ with respect to the FNQ paradigm and (ii) whether and how manipulations of agentivity of subjects and telicity of events affect their judgments of the FNQ diagnostic. Our findings show that (i) the native and heritage speakers’ knowledge about the FNQ diagnostic are largely indistinguishable from each other, (ii) some L2 speakers’ judgments show signs of initial development of the knowledge of the FNQ diagnostic, and (iii) telicity shows clear effects on the FNQ diagnostic with all three groups, while the effects of agentivity are subtle and detectible only with the native and heritage speakers.

Intervention effects and Relativized Minimality: New experimental evidence from graded judgments

According to Featural Relativized Minimality, the local relation between an extracted element and its trace is disrupted when it crosses an intervening element whose morphosyntactic featural specification matches the specification of the elements it separates. This approach naturally leads to a system able to capture degrees of deviance: the relative acceptability of an intervention configuration will vary as a function of the total, partial or zero featural overlap between the intervener and the target. In a nutshell, configurations involving a lesser degree of featural overlap should be more acceptable than sentences involving a higher degree of overlap. Three acceptability judgment experiments systematically investigated predictions ensuing from Featural Relativized Minimality in extraction from weak islands. Four configurations of feature overlap were systematically tested with different methods of data collection and on a large set of linguistically naïve participants. Results from the three experiments are highly consistent in returning that predictions from Featural Relativized Minimality are globally borne out, except for the configuration involving two lexically restricted wh-elements, for which tentative explanations in terms of grammar or processing are sketched out.

Head Adjacency and the Danish Dative Alternation

AbstractThe production of the Danish dative alternation is investigated in a corpus study, which shows that animacy, definiteness, pronominality and length all influence word order. The study demonstrates, however, that definiteness and animacy have a weaker influence than pronominality and length. Two subsequent behavioural experiments investigate whether length had an impact on comprehension. A rating experiment showed no significant difference between short‐before‐long and long‐before‐short orders. A speeded acceptability judgment experiment showed a reaction time difference between the same two orders iff the length difference is two words. To account for the absence of such a difference when the length difference is four words, we suggest that the increased predictability of the second DP reduces the cost of having a long argument before a short one.

A Processing Approach to Complex NP Island Effects in Korean

Questioning the syntactic assumptions of Island effects on movement operations, this paper investigates, through an acceptability judgment experiment with native Korean speakers, whether wh-in-situ questions in Korean show Complex Noun Phrase (CNP) Islands effects, and if so, what causes them? The results of the experiment indicate that the acceptability of wh-in-situ questions with a CNPC violation in Korean shows a wide range of variation and that factors such as distance and referential specificity affect their acceptability. Given that these results cannot be adequately explained by a purely syntactic approach to Islands and that similar facts have been taken as evidence for the processing nature of Island effects in overt wh-movement languages, we interpret them as showing the processing nature of CNP Island effects of wh-in-situ questions in Korean. As for the claim that wh-in-situ questions in Korean do not show CNP Island effects unlike overt wh-movement questions, commonly made and accepted in the syntactic literature, we suggest that the difference in Island effects can arise from the differences in the processing costs of overt wh-movement questions and wh-in-situ questions. Keywords:

Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands.

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential theory – Featural Relativized Minimality – has argued that the wh-island effect is modulated exclusively by the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features in the two wh-phrases, but psycholinguistic theories of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms predict that semantic properties of wh-phrases should also contribute to wh-island amelioration. We report four acceptability judgment experiments that systematically investigate the role of morpho-syntactic and semantic features in wh-island violations. The results indicate that the distribution of wh-island amelioration is best explained by an account that incorporates the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features as well as the semantic denotation of the wh-phrases. We argue that an integration of syntactic theories and perspectives from psycholinguistics can enrich our understanding of acceptability variation in wh-dependencies.

Croatian Mixed-Gender Conjunct Agreement: An ERP Study

In a recent elicited-production study with native speakers of Slovenian, Marusic, Nevins, and Saksida (2007) and Marusic, Nevins, and Badecker (2015) show that there are three distinct variously attested gender-agreement grammars. In this study, the high temporal-resolution of the ERP (event-related potential) technique was used to detect neurological components and measure the processing cost of the three gender-computing mechanisms. The study is comprised of two acceptability-judgment experiments, using a factorial design with nonmasculine mixed-gender conjuncts. Experiment 1 contrasts two strategies, Distant- (DCA) and Closest-Conjunct Agreement (CCA), to question whether the linear distance between a participle and the two conjuncts is language- or memory-related. The Experiment 1 results show behaviorally an overall significant effect of gender; and neurologically a memory-related component, the P300. Experiment 2 sets out to detect alternations to the processing cost when default (Def) agreement is added to the experimental paradigm. The Experiment 2 results indicate no gender effects; instead, two language-related components, N250 and N450, were observed, statistically picking out DCA once again. We argue that in an ecologically valid environment where all three grammatical options are made available, processing of DCA is no longer supported by a general cognitive mechanism, such as memory, but is rather computed by language-related processes.

Different Ways to Test Acceptability Judgments

The testing of acceptability judgments has recently attracted some attention in the study of syntax. This is because many linguists have come to realize that the extensive measuring the correlations between native speakers’ intuitions provides a reliable way to investigate the genuine nature of human language. The growing research interest notwithstanding, the methodology of acceptability judgment experiments has not been completely validated. Since experimental syntax is an empirical science, it is important to develop a strong research methodology for a large-scale and in-depth quantitative analysis. In this context, the research question this paper raises is whether or not different methodologies of acceptability judgment testing yield different conclusions. The present study conducts two experiments that share exactly the same test items but are controlled and analyzed in different ways. Looking into the convergence rate using different methods of experimental control and statistical analysis, the present study provides four findings which can lead to a better methodology for observing native speakers’ intuitions: First, randomization is a mandatory process in acceptability judgment testing. Second, the mean in itself does not provide good statistical power in acceptability judgment testing. Third, sociological variables can affect acceptability judgments. Fourth, the size of sample in acceptability judgment testing should be more than 40 in order to yield a trustworthy conclusion.