Native vs non-native strategies in rendering grammaticality judgments

Laburpena

Grammaticality judgment (GJ) tasks have played an important role in the development of theoretical linguistics, but the study of their nature with learners of a second language (L2) has not received much attention until quite recently. In this paper we examine dyad speakaloud protocols and individual judgments by 36 Spanish subjects studying English as an L2 and rendering GJs in Spanish and in English. Our findings support those of previous research and show that strategies used in judging sentences in the subjects’ first and second languages are not the same. In line with Gass (2001) we suggest that GJs should be used as a data-gathering technique but in combination with other methods in order to obtain more reliable results.