Some psychological effects of violating linguistic rules

Chomsky has proposed that violation of linguistic rules affects the acceptability of the resulting sentence and, further, that the amount of loss of acceptability is a function of the generality and priority of the rule violated. To test this prediction, sentences embodying three types of rule violations, varying in generality, were constructed. The three types of rule-violation sentences, together with the normal sentences from which they had been derived, were studied in three tasks: (a) an acceptability rating task; (b) a free-recall learning task; and (c) a paraphrase task. In the rating task, the sentence types were ordered as predicted. In the learning task, however, the learning ease of two of the sentence types was the reverse of that predicted. Analysis of the strategies adopted in paraphrasing the sentences suggested an interpretation of this result.