Much of the current research on grammar of sign languages involves using acceptability judgments by native signers. In contrast to spoken languages, very little research has been done to investigate the validity and reliability of this method. In this chapter, I discuss the current practice of using acceptability judgments in sign linguistics. I further discuss some cases of empirical disagreement among researchers working on the same phenomena demonstrating the need for more thorough methodological research. I also argue that the fact that sign languages exist in the visual modality, and some unusual sociolinguistic features of sign languages, can also influence the use of acceptability judgments, which should be investigated further. I conclude with some practical recommendations for collecting acceptability judgments from native signers, and include an example of a hypothetical study designed according to these recommendations.

This chapter focuses on experimental psycholinguistic techniques that tap into real-time sentence processing by measuring moment-by-moment reading times or eye-gaze patterns. Data recorded during real-time reading or listening can provide implicit measures of grammatical sensitivity and are a valuable source of evidence for grammatical distinctions, operations, and constraints proposed within the theoretical linguistic literature. A selective review of recent reading-time and eye-movement monitoring studies illustrates how these techniques can help us investigate theoretical linguistic issues and hypotheses, and provide insights into the nature of syntactic derivations and representations. Charting comprehenders' sentence processing profiles over time can help reveal the sources of unacceptability and of grammatical illusions, the point in time at which grammatical violations are detected, the point in time at which grammatical constraints are applied, and can also reveal processing reflexes of a sentence's derivational history.

Since the early development of modern syntactic theory, empirical data from three major East Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, have often challenged empirical generalizations and theoretical proposals based on data from the better-studied Indo-European languages, especially English. Experimental syntax also began with studies of phenomena in English and other major Indo-European languages. More recently, however, a growing number of experimental syntactic studies have focused on East Asian languages, especially in the past decade. This chapter highlights three phenomena explored in the rapidly growing body of experimental syntactic research with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean: (i) split intransitivity, (ii) quantifier scope, and (iii) wh-in-situ. The goal of the chapter is to show that, while the literature on East Asian experimental syntax is still at an early stage, it has already accumulated interesting experimental data on syntactic phenomena with important theoretical implications.

In many introspective and corpus studies, inserting a resumptive pronoun in place of a gap in island-violating wh-dependency structures in English is said to amnesty, ameliorate, or repair the island violation, improving the acceptability of otherwise unacceptable structures. Most experimental studies on the acceptability of such resumptive structures, however, report that native speakers of English do not judge island-violating dependency structures with resumptive pronouns to be more acceptable than the ones with gaps. But studies testing the comprehensibility and processing of resumption report that resumptive pronouns increase the comprehensibility of island-violating structures and facilitate processing of long dependencies. These results taken together suggest that although resumptive pronouns in islands do not have an ameliorating effect on grammaticality, they may confer a processing benefit. A question, however, remains as to whether the reported enhanced comprehensibility and ease in processing actually increase the accuracy in interpreting the resumptive pronouns.

>What is “experimental syntax”? One could reasonably argue that all syntax is experimental, in the sense that traditional syntactic research is based on series of small, informal experiments. On the other hand, one might understand “experimental syntax” to refer to psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments that focus on the structure of sentences. In practice, though, the term “experimental syntax” is generally used to refer to the intersection of these two approaches: studies that focus on the varying acceptability of sentence types and explore this by means of formal experiments. The goal of the handbook is to review what we have learned in the area of experimental syntax, but also to make sense of what this new body of knowledge is telling us, understand how experimental studies relate to the study of syntax more broadly, and explore what type of work we should be doing as the field moves forward.

This chapter surveys experimental studies of Germanic languages other than English, including the Scandinavian languages, Dutch, and German. Experimental investigations of the syntax of these languages are mainly of two types. The first type concerns syntactic phenomena that are found both in English and the other Germanic languages. Several phenomena of this type are reviewed in this chapter, including island constraints, the that-trace effect, and superiority. With regard to these phenomena, the major question has been whether syntactic constraints apply in the same way across the Germanic languages, as would be expected given the close relatedness of the Germanic languages. The second type of experimental syntactic research reviewed in this chapter is concerned with syntactic phenomena that are only found in the non-English Germanic languages. These include word-order alternations related to the verb-second property of the non-English Germanic languages and the less rigid word order of the Germanic SOV languages.

In this chapter, I discuss the relationship between syntactic knowledge and sentence production, surveying previous studies on sentence production as they relate to syntactic theories. I examine representational assumptions that are widely held in prominent models of sentence production and empirical evidence for or against such assumptions, including evidence from speech errors, syntactic priming, and elicited production of complex sentences. I also discuss how syntactic theories and theories of speaking may (or may not) inform each other, focusing on studies that are relevant to the theories of argument structure, ellipsis, and long-distance dependencies. How production methods relate to acceptability judgment and theories of syntax more generally is also discussed.

This chapter reviews the theoretical and conceptual issues central to acceptability judgment tasks, and related paradigms, at the syntax–semantics interface, and provides a broad overview of core results obtained from research in this domain. Challenges faced by studies in experimental semantics are distinct from those in experimental syntax, which at times requires different linking hypotheses, research questions, or experimental paradigms. However, the current state of affairs suggests that acceptability and other offline judgments will continue to contribute highly informative and profitable tools for exploration of phenomena at the syntax–semantics interface.

This chapter discusses the use of acceptability judgment tasks in second language (L2) and bilingual populations. L2 studies that use AJTs can be divided into those that test a variety of phenomena, with the goal of investigating such issues as age effects and ultimate attainment, and those that focus on specific grammatical phenomena. Studies that use AJTs with L2 populations need to consider a number of issues, including task modality, time pressure, the use of context, the type of rating scale, and participants' reasons for accepting or rejecting a sentence. Finally, this chapter addresses the question of what AJTs measure with L2/bilingual populations, and whether AJTs run the risk of overestimating and/or underestimating L2 knowledge. Like any other tasks, AJTs have both advantages and disadvantages, and may best be used in conjunction with other types of data collection methodologies.

Researchers who study child language have a range of tasks available to them for assessing children’s linguistic knowledge and development.Research findings have shown that sentence acceptability tasks are extremely challenging for children younger than 6 years of age. Pre-school children who are ”metalinguistically aware” can succeed, but most children require the addition of contextual support to demonstrate the intended meaning of the sentence. Instead, many experiments opt for truth-value judgment tasks which can be used successfully with children as young as 3 years old. Truth-value judgment tasks can also incorporate a check on children’s interpretation of the test sentence. Two new tasks, the felicity judgment task and the ternary judgment task, have evolved recently to assess children’s pragmatic inferences. The efficacy of the ternary judgment task has not yet been demonstrated but the felicity judgment task has been used reliably, and can reveal the source of children’s decisions, by presenting explicit alternatives as the basis of the child’s decision.

Island effects are one of the most studied phenomena in experimental syntax. There are at least two reasons for this. First, they are a terrific case study for a number of foundational questions in linguistics, covering topics such as the complexity of the grammar, the variation of languages, the dynamics of sentences processing, and the acquisition of abstract constraints. Second, they are a valuable case study for illustrating the benefits of formal experiments, such as defining an effect, isolating the source of an effect, and increasing the precision of the empirical bases of linguistic theories. In this chapter, we illustrate these benefits of formal experiments for island effects by reviewing the major empirical contributions that formal experiments have made to theories of island effects over the past two decades. Along the way, we also provide a relatively comprehensive list of articles that have used formal experiments to explore island effects.

It is common in linguistics to contrast “theoretical” and “experimental” research. Researchers who pursue experimental research are often asked about the theoretical consequences of their work. Such questions generally equate “theoretical” with theories at a specific high level of abstraction, guided by the questions of traditional linguistic theory. These theories focus on the structural representation of sentences in terms of discrete units, without regard to order, time, finer-grained memory encoding, or the neural circuitry that supports linguistic computation. But there is little need for the high-level descriptions to have privileged status. There are interesting theoretical questions at all levels of analysis. A common experience is that we embark on a project guided by its apparent relevance to high-level theoretical debates. And then we discover new theoretical questions at lower levels of analysis that we had not been aware of previously. We illustrate this using examples from many different lines of experimental research.

Formal acceptability experiments are particularly important for languages with smaller communities of linguists, including most Semitic languages. However, experimental studies of sentence acceptability in this language family are still rare, and focus on very few phenomena (notably wh-dependencies) and languages (mostly Arabic and Hebrew). This chapter reviews the extant literature on acceptability studies in Semitic languages. Special attention is given to studies on island constraints, resumptive pronouns – a conspicuous feature of Semitic –and their interaction, revealing a complex pattern of results. The scant literature on agreement and ditransitive structures is also discussed. The review also highlights some unexplored topics in Semitic syntax, which will benefit from future experimental work, including free word order, verbless sentences, and construct states. Finally, the chapter outlines some of the challenges facing researchers conducting experimental work in Semitic, including issues of diglossia, as well as technical challenges relating to script, online databases, and participant recruitment.