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1 results

  • 4 - Variation in Participants and Stimuli in Acceptability Experiments

  • from Part I - General Issues in Acceptability Experiments
  • Edited by Grant Goodall, University of California, San Diego
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax
    Published online:
    16 December 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021, pp 97-117

  • Summary

    Judgments in acceptability judgment tasks are not uniform – because of the conditions involved, but also because of additional variation across participants and across items. Some of the variation is meaningful, some is noise. This chapter discusses both types of variation and provides recommendations on how to deal with them. We show how some of the interspeaker variation stems from micro-differences between grammars. Statistical procedures like distribution analysis or cluster analysis help in detecting such variation. The same procedures can be used to identify variation across items. Further, we outline how to reduce variation across and within items. In particular, we recommend keeping length and complexity of sentences constant as well as the accessibility of NP-antecedents. The rest of the chapter deals with variation stemming from extralinguistic sources. Beside individual differences related to performance factors, e.g. working memory, we discuss methodological artifacts like scale effects and non-cooperative behavior.