Contribution méthodologique à l’étude de l’ordre des mots: Jugements d’acceptabilité et complétion de phrases

Acceptability rating questionnaires are a highly accessible tool for the experimental study of different syntactic phenomena, however, for the study of word order preferences, they are not as efficient as sentence production experiments. In this paper, we present a constrained sentence production task implemented via web-based self-administrated questionnaires. In order to highlight the advantages of such a paradigm, we compare the results of two experiments, an acceptability rating and a sentence completion task, using the same experimental material in order to study constituent ordering preferences in French and Persian. Our results show that acceptability rating data reflect the variation observed in production data only in a reduced manner and, consequently, make it difficult to study factors with small effect size or to identify a canonical word order among different grammatically possible alternatives.