Middle ratings rise regardless of grammatical construction: Testing syntactic variability in a repeated exposure paradigm.

ABSTRACT: People perceive sentences more favourably after hearing or reading them many times. A prominent approach in linguistic theory argues that these types of exposure effects (satiation effects) show direct evidence of a generative approach to linguistic knowledge: only some sentences improve under repeated exposure, and which sentences do improve can be predicted by a model of linguistic competence that yields natural syntactic classes. However, replications of the original findings have been inconsistent, and it remains unclear whether satiation effects can be reliably induced in an experimental setting at all. Here we report four findings regarding satiation effects in wh-questions across German and English. First, the effects pertain to zone of well-formedness rather than syntactic class: a

SUBMITTER: Brown JMM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8112649 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature