Talk:Grammaticality

Responses to Peer Suggestions

Based on the comments from our peer review, our team has reviewed several sections of our wiki article. Firstly, we have flushed out some information in the background section of the article. We had a section that was titled ‘Case studies’, in which we wrote about feral children and Pidgin languages. However, this was not entirely relevant to our topic, so we turned to investigate further into grammaticality judgements instead. We have added a significant amount of information in order to define and explain the differences between grammaticality and acceptability. We have also added some citations and references in order to back up our arguments. Also, we were advised to add some visual aids in order to help readers better understand our topic, so we have created a simple venn diagram to demonstrate our definition of grammaticality, and a few tree diagrams to show how the data is deemed grammatical by speakers. Though the ‘Acquisition’ section didn’t get much peer feedback, we did get some helpful feedback during our meeting with Rose-Marie. What we changed for this section based on her suggestions was removing quotes, and instead paraphrased the information in the paragraph. We also added more blue links to the section, so as to make definitions more clear for first-time readers. In addition, we also changed the heading to ‘Competence’ instead of ‘Acquisition’ so as to make it more clear. The “Models And Debates” section was changed to “Models”, and the subsection “Generative Linguistic Models” was added under it. The quotes we had previously were paraphrased, and more information was added to them. A description of the grammaticality model outlined in (Catt 1988) and (Catt and Hirst 1990) was also added, and the grammar and wording of the articles in the ‘Models’ section was improved.

Annotated Bibliography

Levelt, W. J., Van Gent, J. A. W. M., Haans, A. F. J., & Meijers, A. J. A. (1977). Grammaticality, paraphrase, and imagery. Acceptability in language. The Hague: Mouton, 87-101.

This article is written from an experimental psychology perspective. The authors argue that grammaticality is a crucial concept in linguistics, primarily in defining a natural language. They compare grammaticality to imagery and paraphrasing, stressing the key idea that grammaticality can be acknowledged, even without a full interpretation of the sentence or phrase. Our Wikipedia article is on grammaticality, and while this article’s discussion is not limited to one topic, it still briefly sheds some light on the history and everyday usage of grammaticality. It demonstrates how easily we can evaluate the grammaticality of sentences as native speakers. In all, this article proves useful. I enjoyed the clear layout of this article. Their data was well presented and easy to follow. I enjoyed how it expressed the difference between syntax and semantics. The syntax allows for grammaticality to be perceived, regardless of the semantics involved.

Terence Langendoen, D., Kalish-Landon, N., & Dore, J. (1973). Dative questions: A study in the relation of acceptability to grammaticality of an English sentence type. Cognition, 2(4), 451-478.

This article is written from an experimental psychology perspective. The authors argue that grammaticality is often difficult to determine, based primarily on the concept that people’s judgements vary. The article stresses that this is especially the case when we are posed with dative questions.This article is both useful for our project, and complementary to the above article. It is written from the other perspective, where grammaticality is much harder to determine; a nice contrast. However, the presentation of their data is a little sloppy, and difficult to comprehend. While the question of how to determine the grammaticality is proven difficult; I am frustrated that an answer of some sorts wasn’t provided. Perhaps as long as there are varying judgements, there will also be varying answers to the question of grammaticality. I like how this article, as well as the article above, demonstrate how it can be so simple in certain cases, yet so complex in others.

Nagata, H. (1989). Repetition effect in judgments of grammaticality of sentences: examination with ungrammatical sentences. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 68(1), 275-282.

The purpose of this study is to examine grammaticality judgment of sentences based on repetition. Different levels of ungrammaticality were presented to the subjects in order to understand the validity of the study. It was found that the repetition of sentences made the criterion stricter for adults in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. This study is interesting because it helps us understand that mistakes in parts of a sentence can remain overseen for a lot of native speakers, no matter how much this is attempted to be corrected – “[Judgment might] depend on the degree to which ungrammaticality is detectable and explainable” (Nagata, 1989). This article is written from a psychological point of view. Some shortcomings from looking at this study might be that the subject groups seem pretty small (11 people for each experiment, 22 total) so the findings could be a bit skewed. Also, detection of grammaticality is something that is very subjective, and the level of fluency and knowledge of the language / age of the participants is not explicitly stated. Overall, this study is very interesting, as language is a perpetually-changing phenomenon – it is interesting to see what people a couple decades ago found ungrammatical, and how to compare that to similar studies today.

Berndt, R. S., Blumstein, S. E., Salasoo, A., Mitchum, C. C. (1988). The role of intonation cues in aphasic patients’ performance of the grammaticality judgment task. Brain and Language, 34, 65-97.

The purpose of this study is to examine the success of agrammatic aphasic patients in performing auditory grammaticality judgments from tonal cues to well-formedness of sentences. Patients with different levels of comprehensions deficits for semantically reversible sentences were asked to judge grammatical well-formedness in three conditions. The results showed that agrammatic patients are sensitive to grammaticality despite having poor ability to comprehend syntactic cues. This article can help us in our study since it indicates how judging grammaticality is an innate task for humans, a task that is not easily lost even in instances when our interpretation of syntax is poor. The article seems to be written from a scientific and psychological point of view. Possible shortcomings might come from this bias, as it does appear to be more of a scientific paper than a study of methodology and theory. Overall, the study seems very interesting, as it shows the wonders and extent of the way the human brain works and how it works when it stumbles upon shortcomings.

Knowlton, B. J., Squire, L. R. (1994). The information acquired during artificial grammar learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 1, 79-91.

This article is written from an experimental psychology perspective. Knowlton and Squire (1994) investigated relationship between similarity and grammaticality judgement by examining grammaticality judgement test on amnesic patients and also normal subjects. The researchers suggested that “concrete information about letter chunks can influence grammaticality judgements and that this information is acquired implicitly” (79). Further, similarity didn't necessarily help grammaticality judgements. Our Wikipedia project is about grammaticality and I think this article can help us assess what kind of mechanism inside our brain helps us learn grammar that can generate infinite sentences. Although I cannot conclude what helps grammar acquisition in this article, at least I know similarity is unlikely to be a main mechanism since amnesic patients performed fairly the same in grammaticality judgement test. This article actually surprised me somehow since I thought we knew grammar only because we used that everyday so we had lots of practice. But the article said it might not be due to how frequent we use grammar in our life but more than how our brain perceives and applies learned grammar onto different sentence.

Buchner, A. (1994). Indirect effects of synthetic grammar learning in an identification task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 3, 550-566.

This article was written from a experimental psychology perspective. Buchner (1994) conducted two experiments: the first one was to confirm the competitive chunking model; the second experiment studied the relationship between fast identification of strings because of familiarity and the probability of subjects responded the strings as grammatical. They also pointed out a contradiction between the competitive chunking model when they found that “there was no systematic relation between speed of identification and grammatically judgement which is inconsistent with the prediction of the competitive chunking model that familiarity exclusively mediates grammaticality judgements” (550). I think this article found the similar result as the first 1990s article since they both suggested that similarity and familiarity do not necessary link to successful grammaticality judgements. This helps our Wikipedia project because we can exclude two possible explanations for grammaticality judgements and also the competitive chunking model. I do not really understand how fast identification induces a feeling of familiarity since I thought that should work the other around, that is: the feeling of familiarity induces the response of fast identification since that might be one of the reasons why we judge grammar fast (maybe because we are familiar with that because we use it everyday), However, combining the above articles told us this might not be the best explanation for grammaticality judgement.

Cairns, H. S., Schlisselberg, G., Waltzman, D., & McDaniel, D. (2006). Development of a metalinguistic skill: Judging the grammaticality of sentences. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 27(4), 213-220. doi:10.1177/15257401060270040401

This study intends to determine the age at which children can discriminate and correct ill-formed sentences. The study asked 27 4-,5-, and 6-year old children, in an interview style, to judge the grammaticality of a handful of sentences, and to correct the ill-formed ones. The results showed that with age, the ability to make these judgements improved. It is possible that the ability to correctly detect and correct an ill-formed sentence reflects the child’s developing ability to access syntactic knowledge consciously, as well as to employ that knowledge in the task of processing sentences. The authors of this article suggest that the ability to correct ungrammatical sentences is a much more complex ability that to just discriminate between well-formed and ill-formed sentences. Not only does the child have to determine whether or not the sentence can be generated using their internal grammar, they must also attempt to create a grammatical sentence by using the same lexical items (and meaning) as the ill-formed sentence. By doing this, the child must access internal grammar as well as apply processing operations in their attempt to generate a new and correct sentence. It is therefore possible that with age, the psycholinguistic ability to access internalized grammar is increased. This study will not only help us to understand the internal processing of grammaticality, but also the ages at which this internal processing occurs. A possible shortcoming of this study is the failure to discuss the possible decrease of metalinguistic ability past childhood. As we saw in the previous article, this ability decreases in older adults, so it is possible that there is a ‘critical’ period so to speak, where this internal processing for grammaticality judgement at a peak. This article is clear and concise, making it easy for someone who is not very well informed in the field to understand.

Kail, M., Lemaire, P., & Lecacheur, M. (2012). Online grammaticality judgments in french young and older adults. Experimental Aging Research, 38(2), 186-207.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether or not age is and language processing skills have a relationship. The goal is to study both the roll of age as well as the use of cues (i.e., verbal agreement, sentence structure, or word ordering) on online grammaticality judgements. As quickly as possible, a group of younger and older French adults were asked to detect small grammatical violations in sentences. The rate of detection was analyzed as a function of the individual’s sentence characteristics (i.e., violation, span, position) as well as their age. The study proves that there is in fact an age-related effect of linguistic cues on the processing of grammatical sentences. Both younger and older adults use similar linguistic cues in the process of grammaticality judgement, however the loss of cognitive resources with age worsens the ability to detect ungrammatical sentences as well as younger adults. This article will further our knowledge of grammaticality by allowing us to understand how age is related to the detection of ill-formed sentences, and how each age group processes linguistic cues. The fact that only French adults were analyzed in this study could be a possible shortcoming. Further research should be done in order to investigate whether or not age is related to online grammaticality judgements. The author does not take into account the cultural or linguistic background of these French adults. This study was well organized as well as easy to understand. It would have been helpful if the author had given the well formed and ill formed sentences given to the participants in the study in order to get a better understanding of the linguistic cues at play here.

Bauer, L. (2014). Grammaticality, acceptability, possible words and large corpora. Morphology, 24, 83-103. doi:10.1007/s11525-014-9234-z

This article argues that the notion of an actual word is difficult due to corpora containing “more than one form for the same morphosemantic complex,” with the result that, “rules may have multiple outputs.” The article goes on to postulate that the productivity of the processes involved in a variable rule in morphology may help to determine its output, and, in light of this, calls for a re-evaluation of the notion of productivity.

This article represents an attempt to dig deeper into grammaticality as it actually exists in a single, particular individual, through discerning the difference between actual words, possible words and productivity. It therefore represents an essential step towards our understanding of the processes of grammaticality.

This article is written from the point of view of a morphologist surveying modern work in linguistics in an attempt to build more accurate and precise theories on grammaticality.

The author is writing with a bias towards analyzing grammaticality through the field of linguistics, and thus may tend to be more comfortable using abstract theoretical models to analyze what is going on in the human mind when it does grammaticality, instead of thinking in terms of actual brain processes, for example from the perspectives of neurology or psychology, which could perhaps bring important insights into grammaticality as it actually exists as a process of the human mind.

Overall I find the approach of this article to be very professional, careful, and well-constructed. Bauer has clearly made an important contribution to our understanding of grammaticality.

Bader, M. & Häussler, J. (2010). Toward a model of grammaticality judgments. Journal of Linguistics, 46, 273-330. doi:10.1017/S0022226709990260.

This paper details the results of “three experiments that investigate the relationship between gradient and binary judgments of grammaticality” and concludes that gradient and binary judgements of grammaticality, when assessed effectively, can “provide valuable and reliable sources for linguistic theory.” Based on this analysis, the paper then goes on to “present a model based on Signal Detection Theory which specifies how gradient grammaticality scores are mapped to binary grammaticality judgments” and, finally, compares these findings to the existing relevant experimental data in this field “in order to inquire into the relationship between grammaticality and frequency of usage.”

This paper is significant in that it outlines a model for translating the popular gradient judgment of grammaticality onto a binary model. This translation will be useful in that theorists and researchers will now be able to more easily use data from studies which utilize both gradient and binary judgments of grammaticality in their work, giving them a wider data pool to utilize.

This paper is written from the perspective of university linguistics researchers.

The possible bias of a small and confined sample size which would result from the researchers utilizing only the three studies they conducted by themselves have been avoided through their also utilizing a wide variety of data from many other studies to support their conclusions.

I find the researchers’ paper to be very professional, careful, and a prime example of good scientific research. I was very impressed with their incorporation of both their own research and a wide variety of other’s as well to support their conclusions.