Hi everyone! We are currently studying the learnability of the english resultative construction by spanish native speakers who learnt english as a foreign language. The resultative construction is of particular interest since it has no equivalent counterpart in spanish, unlike the depictive construction, which is present in both languages. Therefore, we aim to compare the speaker's comprehension of resultative and depictive english sentences, and to analyze the influence of variables such as english proficiency, age of exposure, frequency of use, immersion experience etc.
We have already conducted a pilot study where we assessed sentence comprehension by asking the subjects to choose the sentence that best described the item's meaning, in a multiple choice format. However, we were wondering what would be the best psycholinguistic experimental task to evaluate sentence comprehension. We noted that acceptability judgements of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences are widely used to study syntax structures. Therefore, I wanted to ask psycholinguistic researchers what would be best experimental paradigm to study the comprehension of these structures. In addition: would it be more appropiate to administer different tasks and then compare the results? And what would be the best tasks in that case?
Thank you so much for your kind attention!
I think that you can achieve you aim by conducting a language test in which you use different types of questions or tasks. Pay attention to the importance of testing the linguistic items in context because it really affects students' comprehension. So, to achieve reliable results, it is better to include oral tasks, cloze tests, and reading comprehension tasks in your assessment.
Traditionally, norm referenced tests like acceptability judgment tasks are used to measure the learners' competence of linguistic structures. However, by carefully designing criterion referenced tasks , we can also do the job effectively.
Thank you so much for your useful answers! I should have pointed out that we are looking for a task that may be administered in an online format, I guess that includes cloze tasks, sentence comparison and acceptability judgment. On the other hand, would it be correct to assume that acceptability judgment is the most standard and accepted task?
It actually depends on the type of structure you intend to measure. Sometimes, fill in the blank test is the best instrument, while other times you may use grammatically judgement task, writing a compposition or error correction task. In other cases, It is preferred to interview the respondents. Generally, I prefer composition task to measure the overall structural competence of the participants.
Thanks everyone again for your useful suggestions and comments! We decided to start with a combination of our reading comprehension procedure and an acceptability judgement test(including grammatical and ungrammatical versions of experimental and control sentences).
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