Judgment and Interpretation Tasks in Second Language Research

Abstract

This article provides an overview of recent studies in second language acquisition that use tasks that elicit learners' judgments about the grammaticality of language or learners' interpretation of language. We discuss acceptability judgment tasks, preference tasks, truth-value judgment tasks, and other types of interpretation tasks. For each task type, recent studies that use that task are briefly summarized, with a focus on advantages and disadvantages of the methodology in relation to the study's objectives. A variety of topics related to task administration are covered, including (but not limited to) different types of rating scales; presentation of target sentences in isolation versus in the context of other sentences, stories, and/or pictures; visual versus auditory modality of presentation; and timed versus untimed tasks.

What’s in the Textbook and What’s in the Mind

“…In common with much generative linguistic research, we investigate knowledge of what is ungrammatical in addition to what is grammatical (Ionin and Zyzik, 2014;Schütze and Sprouse, 2013). Ungrammatical instances of linguistic phenomena are not produced, therefore they are also not observable in the input that learners encounter, unless explanation of the ungrammaticality is covered by teaching.…”

“…This paper investigates the question of how second language (L2) knowledge of a specific linguistic phenomenon develops when some properties of that phenomenon are explicitly covered by classroom instruction but others are neither covered by instruction nor frequently observable in the input. In common with much generative linguistic research, we investigate knowledge of what is ungrammatical in addition to what is grammatical (Ionin & Zyzik, 2014; Schütze & Sprouse, 2014). Ungrammatical instances of linguistic phenomena are not produced, therefore they are also not observable in the input that learners encounter, unless explanation of the ungrammaticality is covered by teaching.…”

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation

“…We designed two experiments, one for Basque and another one for Spanish (Castilian Spanish and BC-Spanish), each consisting of two experimental tasks: an acceptability judgment task and a picture-matching task (Schütze and Sprouse, 2013; Ionin and Zyzik, 2014; Tonhauser and Matthewson, 2015; Juzek, 2016). In the first task, participants were presented with a sentence with no preceding context and had to judge its well-formedness on a five-point Likert Scale after reading the following instruction: “Read the sentence and decide how good it is for a speaker of {Basque, Spanish} on a scale from 1 to 5.” In this gradient scale score 1 corresponded to “least acceptable” and score 5 to “most acceptable.” Immediately after reporting their perception of the acceptability of a given sentence, the participants were directed to the second task, where they were presented with the same sentence and had to choose which of two pictures best represented its meaning.…”

Subject expression in L2 Spanish: Convergence of generative and usage-based perspectives?

“…This written preference task resembles the kind of contextualized acceptability judgment tasks used by generative researchers (see Rothman, 2009) in which discourse factors such as referential ambiguity and contrastive focus are manipulated. This is not to say that preference tasks and acceptability tasks are identical (for a comparison of these methods, see Ionin and Zyzik, 2014), but crucially, both tasks allow for the inclusion of a context that makes it possible to determine if a null/overt subject is preferred, acceptable, or felicitous.…”