Syntactic Judgment Experiments

Informal judgments of sentence acceptability have long been the primary source of evidence about grammaticality in syntax, and have been controversial just as long. In the past decade, there has been growing interest in collecting and analyzing acceptability judgments according to the formal protocols of experimental psycholinguistics, an approach sometimes called experimental syntax. This article reviews the major issues relevant to this approach, namely, the relative reliability, validity, sensitivity, and convenience of formal vs. informal methods.