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| Acceptability Judgment Task× | Self-Paced Reading Task× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Linguistics | Linguistics |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 1996 | 1982 |
| Originator≠ | Experimental-syntax researchers (Jon Sprouse; Ellen Bard, Antonella Sorace) | Marcel Just, Patricia Carpenter, and Jacqueline Woolley |
| Type≠ | Quantified rating of sentence well-formedness | Online measure of sentence-processing difficulty |
| Seminal source≠ | Sprouse, J., Schütze, C. T., & Almeida, D. (2013). A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001–2010. Lingua, 134, 219–248. DOI ↗ | Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A., & Woolley, J. D. (1982). Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 111(2), 228–238. DOI ↗ |
| Aliases | Acceptability Judgement Task, AJT, Sentence Acceptability Rating, Experimental Syntax Judgment Task | Self-Paced Reading, Moving-Window Reading, SPR, Word-by-Word Reading Task |
| Related | 3 | 3 |
| Summary≠ | The acceptability judgment task is the modern, quantified successor to informal grammaticality judgments: instead of a single linguist marking a sentence grammatical or not, many participants rate carefully controlled sentences on a graded scale, and the ratings are analyzed statistically. Built on factorial designs with fillers and counterbalancing, and on response formats from Likert scales to magnitude estimation to forced choice, it turns intuition into replicable, gradient data. The approach anchors the experimental-syntax program associated with Jon Sprouse and colleagues, which tests grammatical hypotheses with the same methodological rigor as psycholinguistic experiments. | The self-paced reading task — Just, Carpenter, and Woolley's moving-window paradigm — measures sentence comprehension as it unfolds. Participants read a sentence one word (or phrase) at a time, pressing a button to reveal each segment and hide the previous one, and the software logs how long each segment stays on screen. Those per-region reading times index processing difficulty: when the parser stumbles — at a garden-path disambiguation, an unexpected word, or a long-distance dependency — reading slows, and the slowdown localizes the difficulty to a specific region of the sentence. It is one of the simplest and most widely used online measures in psycholinguistics. |
| ScholarGateDataset ↗ |
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