Huang Yujing, Ferreira Fernanda
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jan 31;11:73. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00073. eCollection 2020.
Acceptability judgments have been an important tool in language research. By asking a native speaker whether a linguistic token is acceptable, linguists and psycholinguists can collect negative evidence and directly test predictions by linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, which provide important insight into the human language capacity. In this paper, we first give a brief overview of this method including: (1) the linking hypothesis for this method, (2) the controversy about the test, and (3) limitations of the current analysis of the results. Then, we propose a new way of analyzing the data: Signal Detection Theory. Signal Detection Theory has been used in many other psychological research areas such as recognition memory and clinical assessments. In this paper, using two examples, we show how Signal Detection Theory can be applied to judgment data. The benefits of this approach are that it can: (1) show how well participants can differentiate the acceptable sentences from unacceptable ones and (2) describe the participant's bias in the judgment. We conclude with a discussion of remaining questions and future directions.
可接受性判断一直是语言研究中的一项重要工具。通过询问母语使用者某个语言标记是否可接受，语言学家和心理语言学家可以收集负面证据，并直接检验语言和心理语言学理论的预测，这为洞察人类语言能力提供了重要见解。在本文中，我们首先简要概述这种方法，包括：（1）该方法的关联假设，（2）关于该测试的争议，以及（3）当前结果分析的局限性。然后，我们提出一种分析数据的新方法：信号检测理论。信号检测理论已被应用于许多其他心理学研究领域，如识别记忆和临床评估。在本文中，我们通过两个例子展示了信号检测理论如何应用于判断数据。这种方法的好处在于它可以：（1）显示参与者区分可接受句子和不可接受句子的能力有多强，以及（2）描述参与者在判断中的偏差。我们最后讨论了遗留问题和未来方向。
