The Effect of Level of Education on Judgments of Grammatical Acceptability

Abstract

From Chomsky's assertion that the deep and surface structures of very simple utterances are highly similar, it follows that judgments of the degree of acceptability of such utterances should approximate judgments of their grammaticality. To test Chomsky's assertion that all native speakers of English share the same deep structure, judgments of the acceptability of selected permutations of examples of Scott's subject-verb-object-qualifier (SVOQ) were obtained. The design of the experiment was 3 x 8 x 2 x 3 factorial, with three levels of education (Group 1 — university students, Group 2 — people with three or four years of high school, and Group 3 — people with one or two years of high school), eight of degree of disruption of SVOQ, two of familiarity (sentences consisted either of very low or very high frequency words), and three of qualifier (common adverbs, -ly adverbs, and prepositional phrases). The analysis of S judgments (cases where a permutation was said to be grammatical and the same in meaning as the SVOQ form) yielded a significant Groups x Permutations x Familiarity interaction because, in the low familiar sentences, Group 3 (and, to some extent, Group 2) showed less capacity for grammatical discrimination than Group 1. The analysis of D judgments (cases where a permutation was said to be grammatical but different in meaning from SVOQ) yielded a number of significant main effects and interactions, which were generally interpreted as showing that Group 1 showed more grammatical sophistication than the other groups. On the basis of the experimental results it was concluded that Chomsky's assertion regarding deep structure had been falsified.