The Time Course of Grammaticality Judgment

-1INTRODUCTION Halfway through the twentieth century, linguistics underwent a major methodological shift, from distributional analysis of native-speaker speech (BloomÞeld, 1961), to the analysis of native-speaker intuitions about legal sentence types (Chomsky, 1957; for reviews, see Newmeyer, 1980; Sells, Shieber & Wasow, 1991). In most cases, the native speakers who furnish these intuitions have been linguists trained to detect subtle structural facts that may not be obvious to laymen confronted with the same sentence stimuli. As a result, the conclusions reached by linguists do not always match the conclusions that one might draw if analyses were based on grammaticality judgments by naive listeners (for a detailed discussion of this point, see Levelt, 1974). This is a perfectly legitimate reason for linguists to keep their judgments in-house. However, it The Time Course of Grammaticality Judgment