Grammaticality Judgment Task
The grammaticality judgment task asks speakers to decide whether a sentence is grammatical — well-formed according to the rules of their language — and treats that decision as evidence about the mental grammar that produces it. Rooted in Noam Chomsky's generative program, where the native speaker's intuition is the primary data of linguistics, the task ranges from a single linguist consulting their own intuitions to large controlled experiments with binary, scaled, or forced-choice responses. It is a workhorse of syntactic theory and of second-language acquisition research, where it probes what learners know about a target language beyond what they can produce.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press. · ISBN 9780262530071
- Schütze, C. T. (2016). The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology. Language Science Press. · DOI 10.17169/langsci.b89.100
- Gass, S. (1994). The reliability of second-language grammaticality judgments. In E. Tarone, S. Gass, & A. Cohen (Eds.), Research Methodology in Second-Language Acquisition (pp. 303–322). Lawrence Erlbaum. · ISBN 9780805814569
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.