EDITORIAL published: 03 December 2020 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.621267 Editorial: What Are (Un)Acceptability and (Un)Grammaticality? How Do They Relate to One Another and to Interpretation? Susagna Tubau 1*, Urtzi Etxeberria 2 , Viviane Déprez 3,4 and M.Teresa Espinal 5 1 Departament de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 2 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, IKER (UMR5478), Bayonne, France, 3 Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, United States, 4 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, ISC Marc Jeannerod (UMR5304), Bron, France, 5 Departament de Filologia Catalana, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Keywords: (un)acceptability, (un)grammaticality, interpretation, linguistics, experimental investigation Editorial on the Research Topic What Are (Un)Acceptability and (Un)Grammaticality? How Do They Relate to One Another and to Interpretation? That grammatical sentences and their interpretation form the building blocks of linguistic theories is not controversial. Yet, the collection of articles in the present Research Topic shows that the notion of (un)grammaticality, on the one hand, and the observations of (un)acceptability ratings, on the other, can entertain in fact rather complex interactions. That is, the relation between the notion of grammaticality and the actual acceptability that speakers attribute to sentences is far from being straightforward: not only can some grammatical sentences present parsing difficulties that cause speakers to judge them unacceptable, but also sentences that are considered Edited and reviewed by: ungrammatical by linguists could be perceived as acceptable by speakers and lead to reliable Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Sevilla University, Spain interpretations. In addition, the methodology used in the investigation of (un)acceptability and (un)grammaticality and their relation may play an important role in our ultimate understanding *Correspondence: Susagna Tubau of these two core notions which, despite being in principle independent from one another, often Susagna.Tubau@uab.cat crisscross. Therefore, it seems useful and perhaps necessary to engage in actively evaluating how certain research methods can prove particularly useful when trying to establish the degree and Specialty section: extent to which (un)grammatical linguistic structures and their interpretations are (un)acceptable This article was submitted to to speakers, and how this can be taken to reliably and consistently relate to (un)grammaticality. Language Sciences, As discussed in the Hypothesis and Theory article by Leivada and Westergaard, the relation a section of the journal between grammaticality, acceptability (and parsability), as found in the literature, is in need of Frontiers in Psychology terminological clarification, as (un)grammaticality and (un)acceptability do not homogeneously Received: 25 October 2020 manifest coincident scales. Actually, further empirical confirmation that ungrammaticality can Accepted: 02 November 2020 correspond to a speaker’s misperception is found in the Original Research article by de-Dios-Flores Published: 03 December 2020 where so called negative polarity item illusions in English are investigated. The author shows that Citation: grammatical sentences with multiple negations can be perceived as unacceptable under certain Tubau S, Etxeberria U, Dëprez V and processing conditions. This complements previous research showing that ungrammatical sentences Espinal MT (2020) Editorial: What Are could be perceived as acceptable. (Un)Acceptability and (Un)Grammaticality? How Do They In a similar vein, the Original Research article by Blanchette and Lukyanenko offers empirical Relate to One Another and to support to the idea that acceptability and grammaticality are not necessarily equated, thus making Interpretation? it possible for the grammar of English speakers to generate Negative Concord structures that are Front. Psychol. 11:621267. nonetheless judged with low acceptability ratings due to contextual factors. The Original Research doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.621267 article by Hubers et al. also illustrates that speakers of a language can use linguistic constructions Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1 December 2020 | Volume 11 | Article 621267 Tubau et al. Editorial: What Are (Un)Acceptability and (Un)Grammaticality? that violate prescriptive rules. In their article they empirically have been widely used in linguistic research, but have proven investigate how one particular instance of these grammatical controversial, as they have a number of limitations and can norm violations (i.e., the use of the equative particle instead of the include bias in the speakers’ responses. This leads the authors to comparative particle) is processed in Dutch and German. Results propose the application of Signal Detection Theory—a method of three different experiments show that they are processed used in other psychological research areas—to judgement data, differently both from ungrammatical and grammatical sentences. with the aim of more effectively controlling bias. Further support Also closely connected to acceptability is the frequency of that acceptability judgement methodology can blur conclusions occurrence in the context of language variation, as shown in on (un)acceptability is found in Wellwood’s Hypothesis and the Original Research article by Gerasimova and Lyutikova. The Theory article. By considering a case study in degree semantics authors address how different grammatical variants available (i.e., adjective scale structure), the author proposes a two-step to a single speaker in Russian distribute in production and model of semantic interpretation that separates meaning from perception, the main finding being that the more frequent a interpretation, and that relates language to thought. variant is, the higher the acceptability score speakers attribute In short, the articles in the present Research Topic to it. Nevertheless, the variants that are perceived as highly confirm that it is indeed necessary to try to theoretically acceptable by the speakers are not always the ones that occur and empirically explore and (re)define (un)acceptability more frequently in production. and (un)grammaticality as core notions that interact That methodological issues are relevant to the definition in complex ways, not only with one another, but also of acceptability and grammaticality is shown in the Original with the interpretation of sentences. This can certainly Research article by Langsford et al., who manipulate the result not only in a better understanding of what makes instructions given to the participants of an experiment (un)grammatical sentences (un)acceptable, but also of consisting in evaluating the acceptability/grammaticality of the role of performance factors, memory limitations, and stimuli sentences to investigate whether instructions can help processing mechanisms in the evaluation of (un)acceptability, control variability in the motivation underlying ratings that (un)grammaticality, and the interpretation of linguistic has been identified in the literature. Their results show that structures. The methodological choices made when participants indeed rate the sentences differently depending on researching linguistic phenomena related to (un)acceptability, whether they are asked to consider their acceptability or their (un)grammaticality and/or their interaction have also been grammaticality (the latter judgements being more extreme than discussed as an essential piece of the research plan that should the former). not be overlooked. The Brief Research Report by Gavarró shows that it is possible to use grammaticality judgement tasks with children, predicting AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS that the differences in production and comprehension that children may display in comparison to adults will also show in ST drafted the work, which was revised critically by UE, VD, and a grammaticality judgement task, as production, comprehension, MTE. All authors contributed to the final approval of the work and grammaticality judgements would align. The author uses for publication. this methodology to investigate Relativized Minimality in child Catalan and argues that it can help determine whether it ACKNOWLEDGMENTS constitutes a grammatical or a processing phenomenon. The grammaticality judgement task is also the methodology used in The editorial work in this volume has been supported by Perpiñán’s Original Research article on the sensitivity of L1 and grants awarded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía L2 speakers of Spanish to extraction from island configurations. y Competitividad (FFI2017-82547-P), the Generalitat de Perpiñán’s experimental results show that L2 learners and Catalunya (2017SGR634), the Netherlands Organisation native speakers use the same processing and interpretative Committee (Partitivity in European Languages, PARTE), the mechanisms for parsing islands and point at the need to redefine ANR (BIM ANR-17-CE27-11), and the Franco-German ANR- grammaticality more holistically, as factors such as plausibility DFG (UV2 ANR-18-FRAL-0006). MTE also acknowledges an and processability might have a strong influence on it. Academia award from the Catalan Institution for Research and Oseki and Marantz use an acceptability judgement Advanced Studies (ICREA). experiment to investigate morphologically complex words and evaluate five different computational models of morphological Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a competence. Their results show that models with morpheme potential conflict of interest. units outperform models without them. On the basis of the computational modeling of acceptability data, the authors show Copyright © 2020 Tubau, Etxeberria, Déprez and Espinal. This is an open-access that morphological competence is best characterized as involving article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC grammar-generated hierarchical structures rather than external BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original surface linear strings in corpora. publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. On a related note, Huang and Ferreira discuss acceptability No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these judgements in a Methods article. Acceptability judgements terms. Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 2 December 2020 | Volume 11 | Article 621267