On the Informativity of Different Measures of Linguistic Acceptability

By Thomas Weskott, Gisbert Fanselow. 2011

121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article deals with the claim that the magnitude estimation (ME) method of gathering acceptability judgments produces data that are more informative for linguists than binary or n-point scale judgments. We performed three acceptability-rating experiments that directly compared ME data to binary and seven-point scale data. The results clearly falsify the hypothesis that data gathered by the ME method carry a larger amount of information about the acceptability of a given linguistic phenomenon. The three measures are largely equivalent with respect to informativity. Moreover, ME judgments are shown to be more liable to producing spurious variance under certain circumstances.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf8cbb86aff07d81b8a65ceb70d11a1a1d2da615

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. Diogo Almeida
2. Jon Sprouse
3. Tal Linzen
4. Yohei Oseki

In Language and Linguistics

1. Jon Sprouse
2. Diogo Almeida
3. Tal Linzen
4. Yohei Oseki

Citations in the corpus

• A Test of the Cognitive Assumptions of Magnitude Estimation: Commutativity does not Hold for Acceptability Judgments (2011, background): “…for the recent results suggesting that MES is no more or less powerful than other acceptabilityjudgment tasks (e.g. Bader & Häussler 2010, Weskott & Fanselow 2011), since it is now clear that MES is not a cognitively distinct task from the other judgment tasks as was originally suggested…”
• A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001--2010 (2013, background): “…it appears that the higher degree of freedom permitted by the continuous scale results in slightly more noise in ME responses than LS responses (Weskott and Fanselow, 2011), with no noticeable difference in statistical power between ME and LS (Sprouse and Almeida, submitted for publication).”