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"Grammaticality"
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Grammar without grammaticality : growth and limits of grammatical precision
Grammar is said to be about defining all and only the 'good' sentences of a language, implying that there are other, 'bad' sentences - but it is hard to pin those down. A century ago, grammarians did not think that way, and they were right: linguists can and should dispense with 'starred sentences'. Corpus data support a different model: individuals develop positive grammatical habits of growing refinement, but nothing is ever ruled out. The contrasting models entail contrasting pictures of human nature; our final chapter shows that grammatical theory is not value-neutral but has an ethical dimension.
Book
You That Read Wrong Again! A Transposed-Word Effect in Grammaticality Judgments
We report a novel transposed-word effect in speeded grammaticality judgments made about five-word sequences. The critical ungrammatical test sequences were formed by transposing two adjacent words from either a grammatical base sequence (e.g., “The white cat was big” became “The white was cat big”) or an ungrammatical base sequence (e.g., “The white cat was slowly” became “The white was cat slowly”). These were intermixed with an equal number of correct sentences for the purpose of the grammaticality judgment task. In a laboratory experiment (N = 57) and an online experiment (N = 94), we found that ungrammatical decisions were harder to make when the ungrammatical sequence originated from a grammatically correct base sequence. This provides the first demonstration that the encoding of word order retains a certain amount of uncertainty. We further argue that the novel transposed-word effect reflects parallel processing of words during written sentence comprehension combined with top-down constraints from sentence-level structures.
Journal Article
A transposed-word effect in Chinese reading
Studies using a grammaticality decision task suggest surprising flexibility in the processing of the relative order of words in sentences when reading alphabetic scripts like French. In these studies, participants made rapid grammaticality decisions for ungrammatical stimuli created by transposing two adjacent words in either a grammatical or an ungrammatical base sentence, which were intermixed with equal numbers of grammatically correct stimuli. The key finding was that participants made more errors and were slower to reject transposed-word stimuli created from grammatical than ungrammatical base sentences. This suggested that flexibility in the processing of word order allowed participants to access representations of the base grammatical sentences, interfering with their decisions to correctly reject transposed-word stimuli. With the present research, we investigated if a similar transposed-word effect is observed for a non-alphabetic script (Chinese) that uses few grammatical markers and primarily conveys grammatical structure via word order. Such scripts may require stricter processing of word order during reading and so provide a strong test of the cross-linguistic generality of the transposed-word effect. We report three experiments using the same design and procedure as previous research, while varying the length of the transposed words across experiments. In all three experiments, participants made more errors and were slower to reject transposed-word stimuli derived from grammatical than ungrammatical base sentences. This replicates previous findings with alphabetic scripts and provides novel evidence for a transposed-word effect in Chinese reading. We consider the implications for models of reading in alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts.
Journal Article
Auditory statistical learning in children: Novel insights from an online measure
Nonadjacent dependency learning is thought to be a fundamental skill for syntax acquisition and often assessed via an offline grammaticality judgment measure. Asking judgments of children is problematic, and an offline task is suboptimal as it reflects only the outcome of the learning process, disregarding information on the learning trajectory. Therefore, and following up on recent methodological advancements in the online measurement of nonadjacent dependency learning in adults, the current study investigates if the recording of response times can be used to establish nonadjacent dependency learning in children. Forty-six children (mean age: 7.3 years) participated in a child-friendly adaptation of a nonadjacent dependency learning experiment (López-Barroso, Cucurell, Rodríguez-Fornells, & de Diego-Balaguer, 2016). They were exposed to an artificial language containing items with and without nonadjacent dependencies while their response times (online measure) were measured. After exposure, grammaticality judgments (offline measure) were collected. The results show that children are sensitive to nonadjacent dependencies, when using the online measure (the results of our offline measure did not provide evidence of learning). We therefore conclude that future studies can use online response time measures (perhaps in addition to the offline grammaticality judgments) to further investigate nonadjacent dependency learning in children.
Journal Article
A methodological synthesis and meta-analysis of judgment tasks in second language research
Judgment tasks (JTs, often called acceptability or grammaticality judgment tasks) are found extensively throughout the history of second language (L2) research. Data from such instruments have been used to investigate a range of hypotheses and phenomena, from generativist theories to instructional effectiveness. Though popular and convenient, JTs have engendered considerable controversy, with concerns often centered on their construct validity in terms of the type of representations they elicit, such as implicit or explicit knowledge. A number of studies have also examined the impact of JT conditions such as timed vs. untimed, oral vs. written. This article presents a synthesis of the use of JTs and a meta-analysis of the effects of task conditions on learner performance. Following a comprehensive search, 385 JTs were found in 302 individual studies. Each report was coded for features related to study design as well as methodological, procedural, and psychometric properties of the JTs. These data were synthesized in order to understand how this type of instrument has been implemented and reported. In addition to observing a steady increase in the use of JTs over the last four decades, we also found many of the features of JTs, when reported, varied substantially across studies. In terms of the impact of JT design, whereas modality was not found to have a strong or stable effect on learner performance (median d = .14; interquartile range = 1.04), scores on untimed JTs tended to be substantially higher than when timed (d = 1.35; interquartile range = 1.74). In examining these features and their links to findings, this article builds on a growing body of methodological syntheses of L2 research instrumentation and makes a number of empirically grounded recommendations for future studies involving JTs.
Journal Article
Are multiword frequency effects stronger in non-native than in native speakers?
This study investigated whether non-native English speakers showed a processing advantage for high-frequency multiword units (multiword frequency effects), and whether the effects differed between native and non-native speakers. Such a difference has been identified in relation to single-word processing. Native English speakers and intermediate learners of English with languages of different scripts (native speakers of Japanese and German) judged whether English multiword units were grammatical. A significant processing advantage was identified for both native and non-native participants. More importantly, the multiword frequency effects were stronger among non-native than native speakers. The discrepancy persisted even after including individual vocabulary knowledge as a predictor in the mixed-effect models. Furthermore, there was no significant different impact of the effects between two non-native groups, even though German participants responded quicker than Japanese participants. This indicates that the varying influence between L1 and L2 could be explained by within-language, not between-language, variables.
Journal Article
Heterofunctional coordination in German
Heterofunctional Coordination (HC), in which conjuncts bear different grammatical functions (as in English
What and when
to eat to stay healthy
), is assumed to be solely multiclausal in Germanic languages, i.e., to be underlyingly a coordination of clauses. This is supposed to distinguish Germanic from Slavic, where monoclausal HC is also possible, in which the surface conjuncts are coordinated directly. In the case of German, this assumption has not been supported by any empirical studies. This paper offers two such studies—based on corpora and on acceptability judgement experiments—which, however, do not confirm the assumption that German HC is strictly multiclausal. In particular, numerous examples of monoclausal HC constructions may be found in German corpora, while judgement experiments show a great variability of acceptance rates of monoclausal HC in German and demonstrate that the acceptability of such constructions depends on various factors. As this variability does not seem to reflect processing effects, we conclude that a gradient (non-binary) grammaticality approach is needed to model German HC. While the focus of this paper is on deriving the right empirical generalizations, we also include an appendix containing a proof-of-concept sketch of such a gradient grammaticality analysis, which builds on Minimalist Gradient Harmonic Grammar and on ideas from Linear Optimality Theory and the Decathlon Model.
Journal Article
The syntax and semantics of laisser in causative constructions
The French verb laisser (‘to let’) allows for two different syntactic constructions, an Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) construction and a Faire-Infinitive (FI) construction with a postverbal Causee, and for two different interpretations, authorize and not-intervene. According to previous studies (e.g. Kayne 1975), constructions are related to interpretations: the ECM can express intentionality, the FI cannot. In this paper, we explore a different hypothesis: the ECM construction is underspecified and allows for both interpretations, while the FI is restricted to the not-intervening interpretation. We provide empirical evidence from three distinct forced choice tasks in which participants had to match constructions and interpretations. The results reveal that, contrary to both early observations and our initial hypothesis, both constructions may allow for both interpretations, and variation depends less on the syntactic configuration than on semantic and pragmatic factors, namely on the lexical inferences triggered by the embedded verb and the authority relation between Causer and Causee expressed in the contexts.
Journal Article
The transposed-word effect provides no unequivocal evidence for parallel processing
Studies using a grammaticality decision task have revealed surprising flexibility in the processing of word order during sentence reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts. Participants in these studies typically exhibit a transposed-word effect, in which they make more errors and slower correct responses for stimuli that contain a word transposition and are derived from grammatical as compared to ungrammatical base sentences. Some researchers have used this finding to argue that words are encoded in parallel during reading, such that multiple words can be processed simultaneously and might be recognised out of order. This contrasts with an alternative account of the reading process, which argues that words must be encoded serially, one at a time. We examined, in English, whether the transposed-word effect provides evidence for a parallel-processing account, employing the same grammaticality decision task used in previous research and display procedures that either allowed for parallel word encoding or permitted only the serial encoding of words. Our results replicate and extend recent findings by showing that relative word order can be processed flexibly even when parallel processing is not possible (i.e., within displays requiring serial word encoding). Accordingly, while the present findings provide further evidence for flexibility in the processing of relative word order during reading, they add to converging evidence that the transposed-word effect does not provide unequivocal evidence for a parallel-processing account of reading. We consider how the present findings may be accounted for by both serial and parallel accounts of word recognition in reading.
Journal Article
Diverging Grammaticalization Patterns across Spanish Varieties: The Case of Iperdón/I in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish
This study investigates the contemporary grammaticalized uses of perdón (‘sorry’) in two varieties of Spanish, namely Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, the investigation is based on a taxonomy of offenses, organized around the concept of ‘face’ and based on spoken data of Spanish from Mexico and Spain. This taxonomy turns out to be a fruitful methodological tool for the analysis of apologetic markers: it does not only offer usage-based evidence for previous theorizing concerning the grammaticalization process of apologetic markers, but also leads to a refinement of these previous results from a contrastive point of view. Evidence from both corpora suggests a more advanced stage in the grammaticalization process of perdón in Mexican Spanish, where it can be used not only as a self-face-saving device geared towards the positive face of the speaker, but also in turn-taking contexts oriented towards the negative face of the interlocutor. Peninsular Spanish, on the other hand, resorts to a more varied gamut of apologetic markers in these contexts.
Journal Article