Using two-alternative forced choice tasks and Thurstone’s law of comparative judgments for code-switching research

Stadthagen-González, H.; López, L.; Parafita Couto, M.C.; Párraga, A. (2017)

Article / Letter to editor

This article argues that 2-alternative forced choice tasks and Thurstone’s law of comparative judgments (Thurstone, 1927) are well suited to investigate code-switching 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.

• All authors: Stadthagen-González, H.; López, L.; Parafita Couto, M.C.; Párraga, A.
• Date: 2017-09-18
• DOI: doi:10.1075/lab.16030.sta