Acceptability rating study "Siberian"

The aim of the study was to identify which of the two German verbs sich benehmen or sich verhalten is the best comparison to the copula. The study had only two conditions based on the type of verb used with the adjective (sich verhalten vs. sich benehmen). The 345 adjectives were extracted from a random sample of 2000 examples the DeReKo T-tagged corpus using the online interface Cosmas II.

The participants were seated in a computer pool in front of a computer and asked to read short sentences and asked to rate their acceptability on a scale of 1 (very unnatural) to 7 (very natural). They were asked to read naturally and answer as quickly as possible. The experiment was preceeded by an exercise with 4 sentences (2 natural and 2 unnatural ones). Every list started with 3 filler items. The items were randomly assigned to one of 2 groups and distributed over two respective lists via the Latin square design. The resulting 172 per list were supplemented by 546 fillers. The resulting 4 lists were presented in a pseudorandomized order so that there were at least three fillers between two items. The lists were counterballanced.

40 native speakers of German, aged 19 to 44 (mean age 26.82, sd=5.36) participated in the experiment. 31 were women, 36 were right-handed and 34 were monolingual German native speakers. Participants came from Rheinland-Pfalz, Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Niedersachsen, Sachsen, Thüringen, Hessen, Nordrhein Westfalen, Bayern, Schleswig-Holstein. The experiment took 55 minutes on average. As compensation, the participants had a chance to win one of 12 Amazon-vouchers for 15 EUR each.