Comparing a wug test and a naturalness rating test: An exploration using rendaku

A growing body of linguistic studies is now deploying linguistic judgment experiments to probe both syntactic and phonological knowledge. A research question arises as to what kind of judgment format is useful to probe our linguistic knowledge. Against this background, this study compares two types of phonological judgment experimentation: a scale-based naturalness judgment task and a forced-choice wug test. The current analysis uses the data from two previous studies on rendaku, a famous voicing phenomenon found in Japanese compound formation, and Lyman’s Law, which is known to inhibit rendaku. Although the two tasks at first sight show a close correlation with each other, a detailed examination of the data shows that the wug-test reveals the influence of Lyman’s Law on rendaku more clearly than the naturalness judgment experiment. While the impact of the results may be limited and modest, this study provides a first step toward understanding how different tasks in phonological experimentation relate to one another. It is hoped that the current study will plant a seed for a research program which addresses what kind of phonological judgment experimentation is best-suited to reveal our phonological knowledge.