Structural Apperception in the Absence of Syntactic Constraints

Twenty-eight subjects were presented with computer generated grammatically deviant strings and asked to carry out two tasks on each of two experimental days. Task 1 was a forced-choice experiment in which 50 pairs of strings were presented aurally to each subject, and he had to select that member of the pair which he felt was the best approximation to a good English sentence. In Task 2, subjects were required to read and rank each string on a scale running from 1 (completely unacceptable) to 5 (completely acceptable). A different order of stimulus presentation was employed on each experimental day; 14 subjects were assigned to one order on the first day and received the other order on the second day. Results show that subjects tend to prefer the same statement over orders and that rank and preference are highly correlated. There are considerable differences in preference among the 50 pairs of stimulus items. Analysis of the data suggests that this task yields information relevant to the linguistic and in particular the syntactic competence of subjects when applied to grammatically deviant strings. Subjects appear to be trying to cope with the statements by comparing them to acceptable syntactic and/or semantic patterns.