Confronta i metodi

	Elicited Imitation Task	Acceptability Judgment Task
Campo	Linguistica	Linguistica
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	2002	1996
Ideatore	Applied linguists and child-language researchers (overview by Thora Vinther)	Experimental-syntax researchers (Jon Sprouse; Ellen Bard, Antonella Sorace)
Tipo	Proficiency/implicit-knowledge measure via sentence repetition	Quantified rating of sentence well-formedness
Fonte seminale	Vinther, T. (2002). Elicited imitation: A brief overview. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 12(1), 54–73.	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.
Alias	Elicited Imitation, Sentence Repetition Task, EIT	Acceptability Judgement Task, AJT, Sentence Acceptability Rating, Experimental Syntax Judgment Task
Correlati	3	3
Sintesi	In the elicited imitation task, participants listen to spoken sentences — typically of increasing length and grammatical complexity — and repeat each one back. The key insight is that when a sentence exceeds short-term verbatim memory, accurate reproduction is impossible by rote echoing; the listener must comprehend the sentence and reconstruct it through their own grammar. Reproduction accuracy therefore indexes implicit linguistic proficiency rather than parroting. Widely used in second-language acquisition as an efficient proficiency measure and in child-language research to gauge developing grammar, it has been validated as a window onto implicit knowledge.	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.