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Abstract

This article argues that 2-alternative forced choice tasks and Thurstone’s law of comparative judgments ( Thurstone, 1927 ) are well suited to investigate code-switching competence by means of acceptability judgments. We compare this method with commonly used Likert scale judgments and find that the 2-alternative forced choice task provides granular details that remain invisible in a Likert scale experiment. In order to compare and contrast both methods, we examined the syntactic phenomenon usually referred to as the (AC) (apud Stowell, 1981 ), which imposes a condition of adjacency between verb and object. Our interest in the AC comes from the fact that it is a subtle feature of English grammar which is absent in Spanish, and this provides an excellent springboard to create minimal code-switched pairs that allow us to formulate a clear research question that can be tested using both methods.

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2017-09-18
2024-12-02

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Using two-alternative forced choice tasks and Thurstone’s law of comparative judgments for code-switching research
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8, 67 (2018); https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16030.sta
/content/journals/10.1075/lab.16030.sta
/content/journals/10.1075/lab.16030.sta
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): acceptability judgment; code-switching; two-alternative forced choice and Thurstone’s law

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