Psychological Scaling of Linguistic Properties

Abstract

Adults' abilities to judge selected properties of sentences were examined in three separate studies. In the first two, subjects rated the grammaticalness of sentences varying in grammaticalness according to linguistic theory. The judgments showed high within-subject consistency and between-subjects agreement. Furthermore, the resultant scales were linear, indicating that grammaticalness may be viewed as a unitary dimension. There was, however, some indication that differential interpretability affected the judgments. In the third study, subjects rated sentences on the basis of (a) grammaticalness, (b) meaningfulness, (c) familiarity, or (d) ordinariness. Using a principal components analysis of the ratings, grammaticalness and meaningfulness were represented by orthogonal factors while familiarity and ordinariness could not be distinguished from one another. Implications of these data for the relations between linguistic and psychological analyses of language and language behaviour are examined.