Using Two-Alternative Forced Choice Tasks and Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgments for Code-Switching Research

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2018

School

Psychology

Abstract

This article argues that 2-alternative forced choice tasks and Thurstone's law of comparative judgments (Thurstone, 1927) are well suited to investigate codeswitching 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 Adjacency Condition (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.

Publication Title

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism

Volume

8

Issue

1

First Page

67

Last Page

97

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