Satiation

doi:10.1017/9781108569620.007

6 - Satiation

from Part I - General Issues in Acceptability Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021

William Snyder

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Grant Goodall

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Grant Goodall: Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego

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Summary

Satiation refers to an increase, over time, in the willingness of a native-speaker consultant to agree that a given syntactic structure is grammatically well-formed. Studies show that satiation can be induced under laboratory conditions, within a single testing session; that the effect is restricted to a small number of sentence types (chiefly those involving wh-extraction from wh-islands, subjects, and certain complex NPs); that experimentally induced satiation can persist for at least four weeks; and that satiation sometimes ”carries over” to syntactically related sentence types. Tables are provided showing the methods and findings of satiation studies on seven different types of syntactic violation. Larger issues include (i) whether the satiable sentence types form a natural class within generative syntax; (ii) whether satiation is a unitary phenomenon, or merely a family of similar phenomena; and (iii) how, in principle, satiation can serve as a tool for language research.

Keywords

satiation syntactic satiation grammaticality acceptability linguistic judgment wh-movement island effects processing difficulty experimental syntax

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 154 - 180

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108569620.007 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

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