Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

This study examined grammaticality judgements of tense by 40 young adult native speakers of Shona during an online task. This study reports response accuracy and reaction times on the reading of time reference violations in which verb forms do not match a time frame previously set by an adverb. The judgements were elicited using 240 sentences with and without grammatical violations during an online reading task. Overall, in the experimental task, the native speakers performed below 78% across the four conditions, despite the sentences having received acceptability ratings of 1 = acceptable, 2 = unacceptable for grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, respectively. Sentences with the violation of the recent past by remote past tense verb had the lowest response accuracy scores. The participants also took the longest time to detect the errors in this same condition, meaning sentences with the recent past adverb context had the lowest response accuracy, with the sentence with the recent past context and remote past tense verb violation the most difficult to detect. The participants were quicker in detecting errors in the sentences with the remote adverb context and recent past tense verb. The findings demonstrate the utility of grammaticality judgement tasks for revealing language processing difficulties.

Funding Source

This work benefited from a grant awarded to the author through Roelien Bastiannse from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the Clinical Linguistics Consortium of Universities. Preliminary results from this study were presented at the 18th Science of Aphasia International Conference at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, which ran from 11 to 14 September 2017. The work also benefited from stimuli design from Olga Dragoy. This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Taylor & Francis.

Comments

First published in Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (2024): https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2023.2313069

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

DOI

10.2989/16073614.2024.2313069

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