The DOI matches its Crossref record; 38 of the 38 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Magnitude Estimation of Linguistic Acceptability
Abstract
Judgments of linguistic acceptability constitute an important source of evidence for theoretical and applied linguistics, but are typically elicited and represented in ways which limit their utility. This paper describes how MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION, a technique used in psychophysics, can be adapted for eliciting acceptability judgments. Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability is shown to solve the measurement scale problems which plague conventional techniques; to provide data which make fine distinctions robustly enough to yield statistically significant results of linguistic interest; to be usable in a consistent way by linguistically naive speaker-hearers, and to allow replication across groups of subjects. Methodological pitfalls are discussed and suggestions are offered for new approaches to the analysis and measurement of linguistic acceptability.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
On the Theory of Scales of Measurement
Stevens, S. S. (1946) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.103.2684.677 · Cited by 4,761
Stevens, S. S. (1957) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/h0046162 · Cited by 3,361
Rizzi, L. (1982) · De Gruyter eBooks · doi:10.1515/9783110883718 · Cited by 2,107
Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis
Perlmutter, D. M. (1978) · Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society · doi:10.3765/bls.v4i0.2198 · Cited by 1,805
Introduction to Government and Binding Theory
Haegeman, L. (1991) · Cited by 1,588
Psychophysics: Introduction to Its Perceptual, Neural and Social Prospects
Stevens, S. S. (1975) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 1,509
Some principles of linguistic methodology
Labov, W. (1972) · Language in Society · doi:10.1017/s0047404500006576 · Cited by 1,236
The Direct Estimation of Sensory Magnitudes: Loudness
Stevens, S. S. (1956) · The American Journal of Psychology · doi:10.2307/1418112 · Cited by 772
The new psychophysics: Six models for magnitude estimation.
Poulton, E. C. (1968) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/h0025267 · Cited by 634
Link, S., & Poulton, E. C. (1991) · The American Journal of Psychology · doi:10.2307/1423161 · Cited by 537
Research works printed but not linked: 30
- Chomsky, 1991, Principles and parameters in comparative grammar, 417
- Sorace, Antonella . 1995. Optimality, gradients of grammaticality, and interlanguage grammars. Paper presented at the Language Acquisition Research Symposium, Utrecht.
- Stevens, 1951, Handbook of experimental psychology, 1
- 10.1515/9783110874150-009 · doi:10.1515/9783110874150-009
- 10.1037/0033-2909.100.3.398 · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.100.3.398 · Paper page
- Cross, 1974, Stevens, 23
- 10.1515/9783110872415 · doi:10.1515/9783110872415
- McCarthy, 1993, Prosodic morphology: Constraint interaction and satisfaction
- 10.1016/0049-089X(76)90023-5 · doi:10.1016/0049-089x(76)90023-5
- Sorace, 1996, The current state of interlanguage
- 10.1177/002383097702000302 · doi:10.1177/002383097702000302
- Quirk, 1970, Elicitation experiments in English: Linguistic studies in use and attitude
- Cross, 1982, Social attitudes and psychological measurement, 73
- 10.2466/pms.1987.65.1.295 · doi:10.2466/pms.1987.65.1.295
- 10.2466/pms.1987.65.3.907 · doi:10.2466/pms.1987.65.3.907
- 10.1037/0033-2909.87.3.564 · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.87.3.564 · Paper page
- 10.1016/0024-3841(94)90337-9 · doi:10.1016/0024-3841(94)90337-9
- Robertson, Dan , Sorace, Antonella ; and Bard, Ellen Gurman . 1993. Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability as a tool for studying second language acquisition. Paper presented at the International Conference on the Psychology of Language and Communication, University of Glasgow.
- Sorace, 1990, Individualising the assessment of language abilities, 127
- Rizzi, 1990, Relativized minimality
- Bard, 1994, Research Paper HCRC/RP-52
- Dawson, 1974, Stevens, 49
- 10.1037/0033-2909.96.2.394 · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.96.2.394
- 10.1007/978-94-009-4522-7 · doi:10.1007/978-94-009-4522-7
- 10.2466/pms.1963.17.2.611 · doi:10.2466/pms.1963.17.2.611
- 10.1515/prbs.1989.1.1.63 · doi:10.1515/prbs.1989.1.1.63
- Levin, 1995, Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantic interface
- Sorace, 1992, Lexical conditions on syntactic knowledge: Auxiliary selection in native and non-native grammars of Italian
- Chomsky, 1986, Barriers
- 10.2466/pms.1962.15.1.3 · doi:10.2466/pms.1962.15.1.3
Cited by
Gatt, A., & Krahmer, E. (2018) · Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research · doi:10.1613/jair.5477 · Cited by 776
Second language acquisition: Theoretical and experimental issues in contemporary research
Epstein, S. D., Flynn, S., & Martohardjono, G. (1996) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x00043521 · Cited by 520
Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency
Hawkins, J. A. (2014) · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199664993.001.0001 · Cited by 405
The Effects of Task Repetition on Linguistic Output
Gass, S., Mackey, A., Alvarez‐Torres, M. J., & Fernández‐García, M. (1999) · Language Learning · doi:10.1111/0023-8333.00102 · Cited by 291
Best practices for the human evaluation of automatically generated text
van der Lee, C., Gatt, A., van Miltenburg, E., Wubben, S., & Krahmer, E. (2019) · Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation · doi:10.18653/v1/w19-8643 · Cited by 205
Metadata
- Authors
- Bard, E. G., Robertson, D., & Sorace, A.
- Venue
- Language
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1996-03
- Volume
- 72
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 32
- ISSN
- 0097-8507 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1991158387
- Cited by
- 721
- References
- 38
- FWCI
- 38.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Magnitude Estimation of Linguistic Acceptability. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/416793
- The paper
- Bard, E. G., Robertson, D., & Sorace, A. (1996). Magnitude Estimation of Linguistic Acceptability. Language. https://doi.org/10.2307/416793
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.