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15 - Judgments of Acceptability, Truth, and Felicity in Child Language

from Part III - Experimental Studies of Specific Populations and Language Families

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Rosalind Thornton
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

Researchers who study child language have a range of tasks available to them for assessing children’s linguistic knowledge and development.Research findings have shown that sentence acceptability tasks are extremely challenging for children younger than 6 years of age. Pre-school children who are ”metalinguistically aware” can succeed, but most children require the addition of contextual support to demonstrate the intended meaning of the sentence. Instead, many experiments opt for truth-value judgment tasks which can be used successfully with children as young as 3 years old. Truth-value judgment tasks can also incorporate a check on children’s interpretation of the test sentence. Two new tasks, the felicity judgment task and the ternary judgment task, have evolved recently to assess children’s pragmatic inferences. The efficacy of the ternary judgment task has not yet been demonstrated but the felicity judgment task has been used reliably, and can reveal the source of children’s decisions, by presenting explicit alternatives as the basis of the child’s decision.

Keywords

sentence acceptability tasktruth-value judgment taskfelicity judgment taskternary judgment taskcompetenceperformancepresuppositionmetalinguistic judgmentchild language
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 394 - 420
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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