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

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 repea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2021-05, Vol.16 (5), p.e0251280-e0251280
Main Authors: Brown, J M M, Fanselow, Gisbert, Hall, Rebecca, Kliegl, Reinhold
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acceptability
Analysis
Biology and Life Sciences
Computer and Information Sciences
Construction
Earth Sciences
Engineering and Technology
Experiments
Grammar, Comparative and general
Hypotheses
Linguistics
Research and Analysis Methods
Satiety
Social Sciences
Syntactic movement
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0251280