Horses for courses: When acceptability judgments are more suitable than structural priming (and vice versa)

Abstract

Although structural priming is often the most suitable paradigm, it sometimes misses effects that are detected by more sensitive acceptability-judgment tasks, thus yielding incorrect conclusions. For example, Branigan & Pickering's (B&P's) claim that "syntactic representations do not contain semantic information" (sect. 2.1, para. 2), while supported by structural-priming studies of the passive, is undermined by an acceptability-judgment study of this construction.