Disturbing Factors in a Linguistic Usage Test

Abstract The particular inquiry commented on here concerns French liaison. The aim of this paper is to show that some disturbing factors can prevent the results of such an inquiry from being interpreted as exact measures of linguistic regularities. Particularly, the answers given to a specific question may be biased by the influence of the surrounding questions; moreover, the testees, when answering a series of questions on the same item, answer in an increasingly systematic manner. Finally, one should never arrange the questions for an inquiry by intuition, because this as well might well bias the results. Eventhough the answers obtained from speakers cannot be considered to exactly reflect their competence, these results still will be more credible than when a linguist relies on his own competence only. If the testees after ten minutes already answer less spontaneously than at the beginning, the linguist who deals with the same problem for a much longer time cannot keep his mind from being influenced by...