Acceptability Judgment Task
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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- 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 10.1016/j.lingua.2013.07.002
- Bard, E. G., Robertson, D., & Sorace, A. (1996). Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability. Language, 72(1), 32–68. · DOI 10.2307/416793
- Schütze, C. T. (2016). The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology. Language Science Press. · DOI 10.17169/langsci.b89.100
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.