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4 - Variation in Participants and Stimuli in Acceptability Experiments

from Part I - General Issues in Acceptability Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Jana Häussler  and
Tom S. Juzek
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

Judgments in acceptability judgment tasks are not uniform – because of the conditions involved, but also because of additional variation across participants and across items. Some of the variation is meaningful, some is noise. This chapter discusses both types of variation and provides recommendations on how to deal with them. We show how some of the interspeaker variation stems from micro-differences between grammars. Statistical procedures like distribution analysis or cluster analysis help in detecting such variation. The same procedures can be used to identify variation across items. Further, we outline how to reduce variation across and within items. In particular, we recommend keeping length and complexity of sentences constant as well as the accessibility of NP-antecedents. The rest of the chapter deals with variation stemming from extralinguistic sources. Beside individual differences related to performance factors, e.g. working memory, we discuss methodological artifacts like scale effects and non-cooperative behavior.

Keywords

variationnoiseinterspeaker variationmicrovariationindividual differencesperformance factorsitem constructionscale effectsnon-cooperative behavior
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 97 - 117
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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