Steven Langsford

University of Adelaide · School of Psychology

We present a state-trace analysis of sentence ratings elicited by asking participants to evaluate the overall acceptability of a sentence and those elicited by asking participants to focus on structural well-formedness only. Appealing to literature on “grammatical illusion” sentences, we anticipated that a simple instruction manipulation might prom...

Understanding and measuring sentence acceptability is of fundamental importance for linguists, but although many measures for doing so have been developed, relatively little is known about some of their psychometric properties. In this paper we evaluate within- and between-participant test-retest reliability on a wide range of measures of sentence...

Understanding and measuring sentence acceptability is of fundamental importance for linguists, but although many measures for doing so have been developed, relatively little is known about some of their psychometric properties. In this paper we evaluate within- and between-participant test-retest reliability on a wide range of measures of sentence...

The transformational theory of similarity suggests that when judging similarity, people are sensitive to the number of transformation operations needed to make two compared representations match. Although this theory has been influential, little is known about how transformations are learned and to what extent learned transformations affect similar...

Previous work has shown that the information value of requests can be manipulated by controlling the sparsity of hypotheses, the degree to which category members are rare or common in the domain under consideration when making those requests. However, the degree to which people are sensitive to expected information value is unknown. This study exam...

The presence of congruent features may suggest to the brain that stimuli in different modalities are due to a common cause. Previous work has presented conflicting results regarding the impact of congruence on simultaneity judgments, widely thought to be related to judgments of common cause. Here, a novel experimental paradigm using a single changi...