The Effect of Repetition on Acceptability and Confidence Judgments of Linguistic Tokens Elliot Schwartz
The Effect of Repetition on Acceptability and Confidence Judgments of Linguistic Tokens
What is generative linguistics? ● Syntax : the structure of words and phrases within a language ○ “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” ● Grammar : the underlying syntactic rules of a language ○ Speakers have have a tacit knowledge of their mental grammars How do linguists learn about mental grammars?
The Effect of Repetition on Acceptability and Confidence Judgments of Linguistic Tokens
Acceptability judgments ● Native speaker are presented with sentence and asked to judge whether they find it natural and consider it something they could say under the appropriate circumstances (1) The cat sat on the mat (2) * Cat the mat the on sat
What’s the problem? ● Competence : a speaker’s abstract, underlying knowledge of their language ● Performance : the speaker’s use of that knowledge in concrete situations
Extra-grammatical factors Humans are limited capacity processors; acceptability judgments reflect performance cannot be taken as a direct indication of grammatical competence. Expertise (Culbertson & Gross, 2009; Dąbrowska, 2010) ○ Working memory (Casasanto, Hofmeister, & Sag, 2010; Gibson & James, ○ 1999) Context (Warner & Glass, 1987) ○ The impact of such factors cannot be determined a priori
Formal Informal ● Solicited from ● Self-solicited participants ● Linguistic expertise ● Minimal linguistic ● Small number of experience sentence tokens ● Large number of ● Small sample size sentence tokens ● Large sample size
The Effect of Repetition on Acceptability and Confidence Judgments of Linguistic Tokens
Syntactic Satiation ● Phenomenon in which repeatedly judging an ungrammatical structure leads to an increase in acceptability ● Frequently reported by linguists but mixed empirical results
The Effect of Repetition on Acceptability and Confidence Judgments of Linguistic Tokens
Mechanisms for Satiation ● Repeated judgment decrease the ability to process syntactic features Acceptability may increase in ungrammatical structures because... ○ Features causing grammatical violations can no longer be distinguished ○ A Decrease in processing ability may decrease one’s confidence in their ability judge. How do we distinguish these possibilities? Introduce a second rating scale!
The Effect of Repetition on Acceptability and Confidence Judgments of Linguistic Tokens
Hypotheses 1. Ungrammatical structures will show an increase in acceptability after repeated exposure 2. Ungrammatical structures will show a decrease in confidence after repeated exposure 3. For ungrammatical structures, increases in acceptability will correlate with decreases in confidence
Method Participants : 30 Carleton College students, native English speakers, minimal ● linguistic experience Procedure : Participants made judgments of both acceptability and confidence ● for eight syntactic structures (four grammatical, four ungrammatical) Total of 56 sentences presented in seven blocks ○ Judgments on a 7-point Likert Scale (1: “Completely unacceptable,” 7: ○ “Completely acceptable”) Presented online using Qualtrics Software ○
Materials Whether Island (ungrammatical) ● Situation: Julia asked whether snakes lay eggs. ○ * What did Julia ask whether snakes lay? ○ Adjunct Island (ungrammatical) ● Situation: Susan walked out of the theater during the intermission. ○ * What did Susan walk out of the theater during? ○ Matrix Subject (grammatical) ● Situation: Jeremy believes everyone should be able to attend college. ○ * Who believes everyone should be able to attend college? ○
Hypothesis 1 :Ungrammatical structures will show an increase in acceptability after repeated exposure ○ Only one structure (adjunct islands) showed a significant increase in acceptability. ○ All four ungrammatical structures trended toward increases in acceptability
Hypothesis 2 : Ungrammatical structures will show a decrease in confidence after repeated exposure ○ No structures showed significant decreases in confidence ○ All four ungrammatical structures trended toward decreases in confidence
Hypothesis 3 : For ungrammatical structures, increases in acceptability will correlate with decreases in confidence ○ I found a small ( r = -.20 ) but significant correlation between increases in acceptability and decreases in confidence
Implications ● Satiation effects do not invalidate informal methodology (at least in the short term) ● More work is needed to identify the particular structures subject to satiation ● The situation may be more worrisome in languages other than English
Thanks My primary reader: Kathie Galotti ● My second readers: Roy Elveton and Cherlon Ussery ● Dustin Chacón ● My Fellow Majors: Ahmed Abdirahman, Morgan Ross, and Valerie Umscheid ● My Participants ● Pam Groves-Gaggioli ● My friends and family ●
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