Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T07:20:31.218Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Setting the empirical record straight: Acceptability judgments appear to be reliable, robust, and replicable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2017

Jon Sprouse  and
Diogo Almeida
Jon Sprouse
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-1145. jon.sprouse@uconn.eduwww.sprouse.uconn.edu
Diogo Almeida
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. diogo@nyu.eduhttp://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/academics/faculty/diogo-almeida.html
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Branigan & Pickering (B&P) advocate the use of syntactic priming to investigate linguistic representations and argue that it overcomes several purported deficiencies of acceptability judgments. While we recognize the merit of drawing attention to a potentially underexplored experimental methodology in language science, we do not believe that the empirical evidence supports B&P's claims about acceptability judgments. We present the relevant evidence.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 40 , 2017 , e311
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adger, D. (2003) Core syntax: A minimalist approach, vol. 33. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cowart, W. (1997) Experimental syntax: Applying objective methods to sentence judgments. Sage.Google Scholar
Culbertson, J. & Gross, S. (2009) Are linguists better subjects? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60(4):721–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dąbrowska, E. (2010) Naive v. Expert intuitions: An empirical study of acceptability judgments. Linguistic Review 27(1):1–23. doi:10.1515/tlir.2010.001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Featherston, S. (2009) Relax, lean back, and be a linguist. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 28(1):127–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, A. & Carlin, J. (2014) Beyond power calculations assessing type S (sign) and type M (magnitude) errors. Perspectives on Psychological Science 9(6):641–51.Google Scholar
Häussler, J., Juzek, T. & Wasow, T. (2016) To be grammatical or not to be grammatical – is that the question? Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC, January 7-10.Google Scholar
Hofmeister, P. & Sag, I. A. (2010) Cognitive constraints and island effects. Language 86(2):366.Google Scholar
Kluender, R. & Kutas, M. (1993) Subjacency as a processing phenomenon. Language and Cognitive Processes 8(4):573–633.Google Scholar
Mahowald, K., Graff, P., Hartman, J. & Gibson, E. (2016a) SNAP judgments: A small N acceptability paradigm (SNAP) for linguistic acceptability judgments. Language 92(3):619–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, C. (2006) The real-time status of island phenomena. Language 82(4):795–823.Google Scholar
Phillips, C. (2009) Should we impeach armchair linguists? In: Japanese/Korean Linguistics, vol 17, ed. Iwasaki, S., Hoji, H., Clancy, P. M. & Sohn, S.-O., pp. 49–64. CSLI Publications, University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J. (2008) The differential sensitivity of acceptability judgments to processing effects. Linguistic Inquiry 39(4):686–94.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J. & Almeida, D. (2012) Assessing the reliability of textbook data in syntax: Adger's core syntax. Journal of Linguistics 48(03):609–52.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J., Schütze, C. T. & Almeida, D. (2013) A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from linguistic inquiry 2001–2010. Lingua 134: 219–48. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.07.002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sprouse, J., Wagers, M. & Phillips, C. (2012) A test of the relation between working-memory capacity and syntactic island effects. Language 88(1):82–123. doi:10.1353/lan.2012.0004.Google Scholar
Yoshida, M., Kazanina, N., Pablos, L. & Sturt, P. (2014) On the origin of islands. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29(7):761–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar