Crowdsourcing elicitation data for semantic typologies

In semantic typology, it is desirable to have quick and easy access to crosslinguistic elicitations describing stimuli from a semantic domain. We explore the use of crowdsourcing for obtaining such data, and compare it with fieldwork data obtained through in-person elicitations. Despite potential concerns about the quality of crowdsourced data, we find no difference in the amount of between-language variation and can replicate a cognitive modeling experiment using the crowdsourced data in place of the fieldwork data. Both results suggest that crowdsourcing elicitations is a viable method for gathering data for semantic typology and cognitive modeling.