'Summary.-11 field-dependent and 14 field-independent students rated the relative grarnmaticality of sentences three times, with sentences presented repeatedly during the first and second judgments. AU the subjects received negative reinforcement after the second judgments. Analyses showed that field-independent subjects tended to adopt a more stringent criterion on judgments after than before repetition, whereas no change in criterion was found for field-dependent subjects. Negative reinforcement showed only a tendency to lead field-dependent subjects toward greater change to a more lenient criterion than field-independent subjects. Change in judgments of grammaticality are reliably associated with the cognitive style of subjects, field dependence or field independence. Previous studies have shown that the mental state of subjects influences linguistic intuition in judging grammaticality of sentences (Nagata, 1988, 1989b, 1989~). For example, Nagata (1988) found that a judgment criterion for isolated sentences became more stringent after than before a repetition treatment. This finding was interpreted as suggesting that during repetition subjects had been engaged more in differentiac~n~ than in enriching the syntactic and/or semantic properties of the sentences. Subsequent studies support ths view (Nagata, 1987a, 1987b, 1989b, 1989~). In this study field dependence-independence is examined as a possible variable influencing judgments of grammaticality. Previous evidence suggests that field-independent people with developed cognitive restructuring skills show an impersonal orientation, while field-dependent people with less cognitive structuring skills show developed interpersonal competencies (Witkin & Goodenough, 1977, 1981; Witlun, Goodenough, & Oltman, 1979). For example, studies using an incidental learning paradigm have indicated that field-dependent people have better recall of social words than fieldindependent people (Fitzgibbons, Goldberger, & Eagle, 1965; Eagle, Goldberger, & Breitman, 1969; Fitzgibbons & Goldberger, 1971; Ruble & Nakamura, 1972). Goldberger and Bendich (1972) noted that fielddependent subjects incorporate more social words in free association from previously given incidental words. It is quite plausible then that fielddependent and field-independent people may adopt differing cognitive strategies when judging the grammaticality of sentences. Specifically, since fielddependent people are likely to be more sensitive to social cues in the 'Dee gratitude is due Professor S. Oba €or his advice in carrying out this study and D. D. stein%erg for his reading of an earlier version of this paper. 'School of Health Sciences, Shikata, Okayama 700, Japan.