Experience-driven acceptability judgments

Linguistic acceptability judgments are a critical part of the toolkit for linguistic investigation. An implicit assumption of much work using these judgments is that the data are stable, presumably reflecting the underlying nature of grammatical representation. Here, I demonstrate that for a range of constructions — including so-called island-violating sentences, those with resumptive pronouns, case errors, inflectional errors, and processing complexities — judgments systematically shift upward with repeated exposure to the offending syntactic structure. The data here show that these upward shifts cannot be solely attributed to complex sentences becoming easier to process, or ungrammatical sentences becoming grammatical: the effects are ubiquitous, although they only arise given sufficient exposure. Based on preceding work that highlights the role of adaptation and expectations in online processing and grammar, I consider these effects in terms of probabilistic expectations over syntactic structures that shift with input that diverges from prior distributions.