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.