The perception of gradient acceptability among L1 Polish monolingual and bilingual speakers

Gradient acceptability, which characterizes partially acceptable constructions within a given population of speakers, is a phenomenon whose cognitive underpinnings are yet to be fully understood. In this paper we share insights from a study where the causes of gradient acceptability were investigated from a language-external, speaker-oriented perspective. Specifically, we tested whether the mono- and bilingual status and age play a role in the perception of partially acceptable subject-oriented possessive pronouns and post-verbal adverb placement in Polish. To that end, we performed an acceptability judgement task involving four groups of native speakers of Polish (N = 99), differing in bilingual status (monolingual vs. bilingual) and age (young adult vs. middle-aged). The data were analyzed with mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression models. The results showed that only age was a significant predictor of the ratings of ungrammatical sentences with subject-oriented possessive pronouns. Conversely, the ratings of sentences with adverb placement were influenced by bilingual status. While the findings may be partly explained by different sources of partial acceptability in the two tested constructions, they also show that age and bilingual status impact different areas of cognitive processing.