TIMED AND UNTIMED GRAMMATICALITY JUDGMENTS MEASURE DISTINCT TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE

By Aline Godfroid, S. Loewen, Sehoon Jung, Ji-Hyun Park, S. Gass, R. Ellis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2015

104 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Grammaticality judgment tests (GJTs) have been used to elicit data reflecting second language (L2) speakers’ knowledge of L2 grammar. However, the exact constructs measured by GJTs, whether primarily implicit or explicit knowledge, are disputed and have been argued to differ depending on test-related variables (i.e., time pressure and item grammaticality). Using eye-tracking, this study replicates the GJT results in R. Ellis (2005). Twenty native and 40 nonnative English speakers judged sentences with and without time pressure. Analyses revealed that time pressure suppressed regressions (right-to-left eye movements) in nonnative speakers only. Conversely, both groups regressed more on untimed, grammatical items. These findings suggest that timed and untimed GJTs measure different constructs, which could correspond to implicit and explicit knowledge, respectively. In particular, they point to a difference in the levels of automatic and controlled processing involved in responding to the timed and untimed tests. Furthermore, untimed grammatical items may induce GJT-specific task effects.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/148dc07b019c7d37e994fc7c5ca51b653fa9a37a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. E. Marsden
2. S. Gass
3. Luke Plonsky
4. Dan Brown
5. Shaofeng Li

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. E. Marsden
2. Luke Plonsky
3. S. Gass
4. Dustin Crowther
5. Patti Spinner
6. Dan Brown
7. Kazuya Saito
8. F. Oswald

In Language and Linguistics

1. E. Marsden
2. Luke Plonsky
3. S. Gass
4. Dustin Crowther
5. Patti Spinner
6. Dan Brown
7. F. Oswald
8. Kazuya Saito

Citations in the corpus

• A systematic review of transfer studies in third language acquisition (2018, unknown): “…used, particularly along two axes: online (i.e., real-time) vs. offline measures, and comprehension vs. production tasks (e.g., Bialystok, 1979, 1982; Bowles, 2011; Dussias, 2003, 2004; Ellis, 2005; Godfroid et al., 2015; Jegerski, Keating, and VanPatten, 2016; Villegas, 2014; among many others).”
• A methodological synthesis and meta-analysis of judgment tasks in second language research (2020, background): “Godfroid et al. (2015) used eyetracking to monitor learners’ eye movements during timed and untimed judgment tasks and found that learners regressed more during the untimed tasks; they concluded that the untimed tasks may lead to more use of explicit knowledge than the timed tasks.”