On-Line Judgments of Grammaticality of Sentences

Abstract

This study was designed to obtain on-line processing data for judgments of the grammatically of sentences. 28 students read the initial portion (context string) of sentences and then judged whether the final portion (target string) continued grammatically or ungrammatically the context string. Analysis showed there was an inverted-U relationship between judged grammaticality of sentences and reaction times needed to judge grammatical continuation of the target with the context string. Given a certain level of ungrammaticality, subjects were insensitive to the ungrammatically of the sentences. Findings indicate that the linguistic intuition attributed uniformly to native speakers of language is not displayed in on-line judgments of sentence grammaticality.