![]() ![]() First, the judgment is based on very limited stimuli which can be as few as one or two token examples (e.g., Who do you think that left for the so-called “that-trace” effect Perlmutter, 1968). However, this informal procedure has several potential problems. The reason the procedure involved querying fellow linguists is because a linguist is tuned to detect subtle grammatical differences and can separate syntactic factors from other influences such as semantics and pragmatics. Based on this judgment, they would conclude whether a grammatical principle was supported or falsified. To collect grammatical judgments, linguists would ask their fellow linguist to judge whether a sentence is grammatical or not. These took the form of grammatical judgments. When judgments were first collected to elicit linguistic intuitions, the procedure was quite informal. Compared to observational data which should not be altered, linguistic judgments can be elicited to target specific hypothesis in a systematic manner. These judgments therefore provide negative evidence and allow researchers to directly test predictions regarding what forms a grammar generates and which it does not. Different from methods such as corpus analysis, which can show what structures are possible in a language, linguistic judgments may also reveal what structures are disallowed. This makes the linguistic theory falsifiable. 13), in which it is stated that “he fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences.” In this view of language research, grammar is not a set of rules which passively describe what has been seen in a language, but can be viewed as a system for evaluating sequences and making clear predictions regarding what is allowed or disallowed in a language. An early justification for the use of judgments comes from Chomsky (1957, p. One important type of linguistic data comes from judgments of the well-formedness of linguistic stimuli. We conclude with a discussion of remaining questions and future directions.Ī Brief Overview of Acceptability Judgments The benefits of this approach are that it can: (1) show how well participants can differentiate the acceptable sentences from unacceptable ones and (2) describe the participant’s bias in the judgment. In this paper, using two examples, we show how Signal Detection Theory can be applied to judgment data. ![]() Signal Detection Theory has been used in many other psychological research areas such as recognition memory and clinical assessments. Then, we propose a new way of analyzing the data: Signal Detection Theory. In this paper, we first give a brief overview of this method including: (1) the linking hypothesis for this method, (2) the controversy about the test, and (3) limitations of the current analysis of the results. By asking a native speaker whether a linguistic token is acceptable, linguists and psycholinguists can collect negative evidence and directly test predictions by linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, which provide important insight into the human language capacity. Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United StatesĪcceptability judgments have been an important tool in language research. ![]()
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