Continuous Acceptability, Categorical Grammaticality, and Experimental Syntax

It almost goes without saying that acceptability judgments form a continuous spectrum. While many sentences are either clearly acceptable or clearly unaccept-able, a significant number of sentences fall somewhere in between in a gray are

A program for experimental syntax: Finding the relationship between acceptability and grammatical knowlege

There has always been interest in the methodology of acceptability judgment collection, as well as the reliability of the results. It seems, though, that the past several years have seen an increase in the number of studies employing formal experimental techniques for the collection of acceptability judgments, so much so that the term experimental syntax has come to be applied to the use of those techniques. The question this dissertation asks is whether the extent of the utility of experimental syntax is to find areas in which informal judgment collection was insufficient, or whether there is a complementary research program for experimental syntax that is more than just a methodological footnote to the informal judgment collection of theoretical syn- tax. This dissertation is a first attempt at a tentative yes: the tools of experimental syntax can be used to explore the relationship between acceptability judgments and the form or nature of grammatical knowledge, not just the content of grammatical knowledge. This dissertation begins by identifying several recent claims about the nature of grammatical knowledge that have been made based upon hypotheses about the nature of acceptability judgments. Each chapter applies the tools of experimental syntax to those hypotheses in an attempt to refine our understanding of the relationship between acceptability and grammatical knowledge. The claims investigated include: that grammatical knowledge is gradient, that grammatical knowledge is sensitive to context effects, that the stability or instability of acceptability reflects underlying differences in grammatical knowledge, that processing effects affect acceptability, and that acceptability judgments have nothing further to contribute to debates over the number and nature of dependency forming operations. Using wh-movement and Island effects as the empirical basis of the research, the results of these studies suggest that the relationship between acceptability and grammatical knowledge is much more complicated than previously thought. The overarching conclusion is that there is a program for experimental syntax that is independent of simple data collection: only through the tools of experimental syntax can we achieve a better understanding of the nature of acceptability, and how it relates to the nature of grammatical knowledge

Islands in the grammar? Standards of evidence

When considering how a complex system operates, the observable behavior depends upon both architectural properties of the system and the principles governing its operation. As a simple example, the behavior of computer chess programs depends upon both the processing speed and resources of the computer and the programmed rules that determine how the computer selects its next move. Despite having very similar search techniques, a computer from the 1990s might make a move that its 1970s forerunner would overlook simply because it had more raw computational power. From the naïve observer’s perspective, however, it is not superficially evident if a particular move is dispreferred or overlooked because of computational limitations or the search strategy and decision algorithm. In the case of computers, evidence for the source of any particular behavior can ultimately be found by inspecting the code and tracking the decision process of the computer. But with the human mind, such options are not yet available. The preference for certain behaviors and the dispreference for others may theoretically follow from cognitive limitations or from task-related principles that preclude certain kinds of cognitive operations, or from some combination of the two. This uncertainty gives rise to the fundamental problem of finding evidence for one explanation over the other. Such a problem arises in the analysis of syntactic island effects – the focu

Asymmetries in the Stem and Suffix Masked Priming Response in a Large-scale Online Study

Models of visual word processing incorporate morphological decomposition as a step in the recognition process, but they vary as to when this step happens, and what kind of information is used in it. In particular, the affix stripping model proposes that words are accessed through their stems, after affixes are automatically stripped off. This dichotomy between stems and affixes seems to be mirrored in masked priming. Masked stem priming is quite robust and comparable to masked repetition priming, whereas masked affix priming is often null, or very small. However, the literature on masked affix priming is much smaller than the one on masked stem priming. This study investigates the stem vs suffix asymmetry in masked priming by running an online experiment with a large sample size (N=161) to ensure higher statistical power. For comparison and validation, the same experiment was also conducted in a standard lab setting. In addition, we ran a follow-up experiment with two additional suffix priming conditions with an even larger sample size (N=400) to assess the influence of orthographic and strategic confounds. The three experiments show significant stem priming, but null or very small suffix priming, thus supporting the asymmetry between stem activation and affix stripping

A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a Web application that provides instant access to thousands of potential participants for survey-based psychology experiments, such as the acceptability judgment task used extensively in syntactic theory. Because AMT is a Web-based system, syntacticians may worry that the move out of the experimenter-controlled environment of the laboratory and onto the user-controlled environment of AMT could adversely affect the quality of the judgment data collected. This article reports a quantitative comparison of two identical acceptability judgment experiments, each with 176 participants (352 total): one conducted in the laboratory, and one conducted on AMT. Crucial indicators of data quality—such as participant rejection rates, statistical power, and the shape of the distributions of the judgments for each sentence type—are compared between the two samples. The results suggest that aside from slightly higher participant rejection rates, AMT data are almost indistinguishable from laboratory data

Isolating Processing Factors in Negative Island Contexts *

Introduction The phenomenon referred to as negative islands was originally observed by (1) a. Which project didn't the intern complete __ conscientiously? b. *How didn't the intern complete the project __? A number of proposals have been made in the theoretical linguistics literature that account for the difference between (1a) and (1b) in terms of global constraints operating within the grammar. Building on previous findings in the psycholinguistics literature, we used acceptability judgment measures to provide a new window into our understanding of negative islands. On the basis of results from two such studies, we argue that negative islands are not a unitary phenomenon due to a single global grammatical constraint, but rather the by-product of the simultaneous co-occurrence of different processing factors. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we show that alongside the global constraints proposed in existing accounts of negative islands, there is abundant evidence in the psycholinguistics literature that each of the individual factors that figure into negative islands -namely negation, extraction, and referentiality -incurs its own processing cost. The results from the acceptability judgment studies reported in section 3 demonstrate the importance of taking these individual factors into consideration when analyzing negative islands. In Experiment 1, we investigate the effects of the factors negation and extraction, and in Experiment 2 we additionally manipulate the factor of referentiality. In section 4, we discuss the results of these experiments and sugges