Language production experiments as tools for corpus construction: A contrastive study of complementizer agreement

Abstract

The investigation of linguistic phenomena in corpora of spontaneous speech is sometimes hindered by corpus size or by the complexity of the factors influencing their occurrence. Language Production Experiments (LPEs) can specifically elicit such phenomena and can therefore be used to build corpora that allow for their investigation. Yet experiments are a wide category that covers very different tasks, and there is little empirical research that compares speakers’ response behavior to different task types. In this paper, we compare the responses of a group of 22 speakers to a translation task and a completion task, both of which target the syntactic phenomena complementizer agreement (CA). The results indicate that both experimental methods offer legitimate ways to investigate the phenomenon with specific advantages and disadvantages. However, a comparison of results from both tasks allows for insights that a single task could not have provided.

Methodological Triangulation in the Study of Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation

“…Experimental or quasi-experimental techniques seem to be particularly useful to study syntactic phenomena infrequent in corpora (e.g., Breuer & Bulow, 2019;Lenz et al, 2019;Fingerhuth & Breuer, 2022). But certain considerations need to be made when using experimental tasks to elicit morphosyntactic variation.…”

Exploring syntactic variation by means of “Language Production Experiments”: Methods from and analyses on German in Austria

“…Between these runs there is a short break and another test setting that uses translation tasks to target phonological and grammatical (mainly morphological) phenomena, some which overlap with the phenomena elicited through the LPEs (for a comparison of speaker behavior across settings, cf. Fingerhuth & Breuer, accepted). However, because they are designed to complement each other, these two runs can be considered as one single LPE: For each task targeting a syntactic variable in the standard, there is a corresponding task targeting the same variable in the dialect.…”

“…The LPEs in the SFB DiÖ target both phenomena, which have been rarely investigated in connection with each other (for exceptions, cf. Fingerhuth & Breuer, accepted; Fingerhuth & Lenz, accepted; Weiß & Strobel, 2018). They are illustrated in (2) by means of SFB DiÖ examples from the Austrian Bavarian dialect areas.…”