21.4811, Sum: Study: Acceptability Judgments in German

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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-4811. Tue Nov 30 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.4811, Sum: Study: Acceptability Judgments in German

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1)
Date: 30-Nov-2010
From: Petra-Kristin Bonitz [pbonitz at phil.uni-goettingen.de]
Subject: Study: Acceptability Judgments in German
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:45:24
From: Petra-Kristin Bonitz [pbonitz at phil.uni-goettingen.de]
Subject: Study: Acceptability Judgments in German

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Query for this summary posted in LINGUIST Issue: 21.3416                                                                                                                                               
 

Dear Linguists,

I would like to give a big "thank you" to everyone that participated in my 
psycholinguistic study on acceptability judgements! I made an online 
survey during the time of the 21st of August until the 17th of 
September, for which the test persons had to judge a number of 
sentences in German. Contrary to the assumption of some test 
persons, no sentence was repeated - only their structures followed a 
special system. In the end 644 test persons filled in the questionnaire 
(with 21 non-native speaker of the German language).

The aim of the study is to learn more about the effect of regional 
differences that influence the acceptability judgements of syntactically 
varying structures that differed from normal sentence schemes.
Furthermore, a special method was used, called "Magnitude 
Estimation". This method was realized in a web-based manner. It offers 
us the possibility to compare the new results with conventional surveys. 
With Magnitude Estimation the test person creates their own rating 
scale without making recourse to a fixed 5- or 7-point-scale. I wanted to 
determine how test persons use the open scale and how wide they set 
the scope of the scale. For example, is there a zero point in the 
acceptability, that is, is it always possible to judge sentences as more 
ungrammatical as previous ones or is there a saturation point?

Currently, we're working on a detailed evaluation and analysis of the 
data. First results show that there are regional differences concerning 
the acceptability of structures that differ more or less from standard 
structures (in written language).

Thanks to all test persons and also thanks to The LINGUIST List, which 
helped me reach a lot of interested people.

Best wishes,
Petra-Kristin Bonitz
University of Göttingen, Germany 

Linguistic Field(s): Psycholinguistics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): German, Standard (deu)




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