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Methodologies for intra-sentential code-switching research
Edited by Amaia Munarriz-Ibarrola, M. Carmen Parafita Couto and Emma Vanden Wyngaerd
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8:1] 2018
► pp. 67–97

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

ORCID logo | University of Southern Mississippi
| University of Illinois at Chicago
| Leiden University Center for Linguistics
ORCID logo | Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

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.

Keywords: two-alternative forced choice and Thurstone’s law, code-switching, acceptability judgment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Acceptability judgments in linguistic research
    • 1.2Two-alternative forced choice judgements
    • 1.3Thurstone’s law of comparative judgment
  • 2.Motivation
    • 2.1The AC
    • 2.2Research question and hypotheses
    • 2.3Methodology preview: The role of code-switching
  • 3.Experiment 1: Judgments and Likert scales
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Materials
      • 3.1.3Procedure
    • 3.2Results
    • 3.3Preliminary Discussion
  • 4.Experiment 2: 2AFC and Thurstone’s law
    • 4.1First session: Method
      • 4.1.1Participants
      • 4.1.2Materials
      • 4.1.3Procedure
    • 4.2Results of session 1
      • 4.2.1Unilingual sentences
      • 4.2.2Code switched-sentences
      • 4.2.3Calculation of the Thurstone measure
    • 4.3Second session: Method
      • 4.3.1Participants, Materials, and Procedure
      • 4.3.2Results of session 2
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Appendix
    • Sentences used in Experiments 1 and 2
      • Monolingual base sentences
        • Block 1
        • Block 2
    • Code switched sentences used in Experiments 1 and 2
      • Condition A: Vsp+ADVsp+OBJen
        • Block 1
        • Block 2
      • Condition B: Ven+ADVsp+OBJsp
        • Block 1
        • Block 2
      • Condition C: Vsp+ADVen+OBJen
        • Block 1
        • Block 2
      • Condition D: Ven+ADVen+OBJsp
        • Block 2
  • References
Published online: 18 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16030.sta
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