grammaticality judgments

[Alison Crutchley]

Dear James

You could look at the following to start with:

Crain, S., & R. Thornton. (1998). Investigations in Universal Grammar: a
guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Hiromatsu, K., & D. Lillo-Martin. (1998). Children who judge
ungrammatical what they produce. Proceedings of the Annual Boston
University Conference on Language Development, 22(1), 337-347.
Rice, M.T., K. Wexler, & S.M. Redmond. (1999). Grammaticality judgements
of an extended optional infinitive grammar: evidence from
English-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of
Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 42, 943-961.

No doubt there are more up-to-date references too - it's a while since I
thought about this!

Best wishes, Alison Crutchley

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Dr Alison Crutchley
Lecturer in English Language
School of Music and Humanities
University of Huddersfield
West Building
Queensgate
Huddersfield HD1 3DH

a.crutchley at hud.ac.uk
http://www.hud.ac.uk/mh/english/staff/academic.htm
tel: +44 (0)1484 473848

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-----Original Message-----
From: James Russell [mailto:jr111 at hermes.cam.ac.uk] 
Sent: 16 December 2004 14:35
To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
Subject: grammaticality judgments


Hello,

By this question I'm sure to betray much ignorance. . . but can 
anybody offer advice on trying to evoke grammatically judgements from 
pre-school children. For example, a puppet 'speaks' a sentence (e.g., 
'The apple in on the table' or *The apple on is the table') and the 
child must judge if what the puppet  said was "silly" or "OK".  I do 
recall the silly/OK procedure being used by somebody. . .
I know of Stephen Crain's use of a truth-value judgment procedure in 
a similar way; but I (quixotically?) want to evoke judgments of 
well-formedness.

James Russell
Experimental Psychology
Cambridge, UK