Acceptability judgement tasks Clause Samples

Acceptability judgement tasks. The test used to measure the participant's knowledge of the third person singular “-s” was an acceptability judgement task. This method was chosen because it makes it possible to systematize quantitatively which sentences the participants find acceptable as grammatical or ungrammatical. In an acceptability judgement task, the participants judge the grammaticality of a presented sentence (▇▇▇▇▇▇ & ▇▇▇▇, 2005, 49) or, more precisely, their acceptance of the sentence as grammatical. The answers were scored in a binary system as grammatical or ungrammatical. The score sheet given to the participants is shown in figure 1. There is a total of 48 sentences, 24 of which relate to subject-verb agreement; the rest were fillers (see appendix 5 and 6). Fillers were used to draw the participant's attention away from the actual sentences they were being tested on to prevent them from realizing the test's purpose. The sentences with subject-verb agreement were divided into four categories, representing the four sub-conditions. There were six sentences per category: 1) Main clauses with local agreement, singular subjects 2) Main clauses with local agreement, plural subjects 3) Main clauses with long distance agreement, singular subjects 4) Main clauses with long distance agreement, plural subjects Table 4 shows an example from each of the four sub-conditions: