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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

• Solicited from

participants

• Minimal linguistic

experience

• Large number of

sentence tokens

• Large sample size

Informal

• Self-solicited
• Linguistic expertise
• Small number of

sentence tokens

• Small 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

References

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Questions?