Middle ratings rise regardless of grammatical construction: Testing syntactic variability in a repeated exposure paradigm

Abstract

People perceive sentences more favourably after hearing or reading them many times. A prominent approach in linguistic theory argues that these types of exposure effects (satiation effects) show direct evidence of a generative approach to linguistic knowledge: only some sentences improve under repeated exposure, and which sentences do improve can be predicted by a model of linguistic competence that yields natural syntactic classes. However, replications of the original findings have been inconsistent, and it remains unclear whether satiation effects can be reliably induced in an experimental setting at all. Here we report four findings regarding satiation effects in wh-questions across German and English. First, the effects pertain to zone of well-formedness rather than syntactic class: all intermediate ratings, including calibrated fillers, increase at the beginning of the experimental session regardless of syntactic construction. Second, though there is satiation, ratings asymptote below maximum acceptability. Third, these effects are consistent across judgments of superiority effects in English and German. Fourth, wh-questions appear to show similar profiles in English and German, despite these languages being traditionally considered to differ strongly in whether they show effects on movement: violations of the superiority condition can be modulated to a similar degree in both languages by manipulating subject-object initiality and animacy congruency of the wh-phrase. We improve on classic satiation methods by distinguishing between two crucial tests, namely whether exposure selectively targets certain grammatical constructions or whether there is a general repeated exposure effect. We conclude that exposure effects can be reliably induced in rating experiments but exposure does not appear to selectively target certain grammatical constructions. Instead, they appear to be a phenomenon of intermediate gradient judgments.

Extraction from Present Participle Adjuncts: The Relevance of the Corresponding Declaratives

“…Judging from their experimental results with the standardized fillers, Gerbrich et al (2019, p. 309) conclude that there may be even more distinguishable levels of well-formedness. Note that the E-level is still interpretable, but highly unnatural; it is possible to add a further level with low interpretability, as for example in the adaptation of the standard fillers in Brown et al (2021). Brown et al (2021, p. 10) refer to this as a "clearly ungrammatical level" with examplessuch as The ink was for spilled that are considered both unacceptable and uninterpretable.…”

A Meta-analysis of Syntactic Satiation in Extraction from Islands

“…Recent studies found that acceptability judgments are affected by a pervasive phenomenon called syntactic satiation, or simply satiation: participants in acceptability rating experiments rate degraded sentences as increasingly acceptable as they see more instances of such sentences (Braze, 2002;Hiramatsu, 2001;Snyder, 2000, inter alia). The satiation effect has recently drawn much attention, and there is an abundance of experimental studies testing whether various unacceptable sentence types satiate in English (Braze, 2002;Chaves & Dery, 2014Crawford, 2012;Do & Kaiser, 2017;Francom, 2009;Goodall, 2011;Hiramatsu, 2001;Lu et al, 2021Lu et al, , 2022Snyder, 2000Snyder, , 2022aSprouse, 2009) and other languages (Abugharsa, 2016;Brown et al, 2021;Goodall, 2011;Myers, 2012;Sommer, 2022). However, the satiation literature is replete with mixed empirical findings and non-replications regarding which sentence types are affected by satiation (see Snyder, 2022b, for a review), thus hindering the development of a coherent theoretical picture.…”

On the Nature of Syntactic Satiation

“…14 Due to the decision to focus on satiation studies looking at the same sentence types examined in (Snyder 2000), some work on another sentence types, namely superiority violations, will receive only the following remarks. Briefly, Hofmeister et al (2013) for English and Brown et al (2021) for both German and English reported increased acceptance of superiority violations after multiple judgments. Yet, there are some reasons to be skeptical that their findings resulted from "syntactic satiation" in the sense intended here-in other words, from the type of satiation reported anecdotally among professional linguists.…”