PT Chapter
AU Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez
   Luis Lopez
   M. Carmen Parafita
   C. Alejandro Parraga
TI Using two-alternative forced choice tasks and Thurstone law of comparative judgments for code-switching research
BT Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
PY 2018
BP 67
EP 97
DI 10.1075/lab.16030.sta
DE two-alternative forced choice and Thurstone's law; acceptability judgment; code-switching
AB 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.
ER