wvux-2026-03-16_10_45_21-10-1515-applirev-2024-0050.pdf
wvux-2026-03-16_10_45_21-10-1515-applirev-2024-0050.pdf
Sylwiusz Żychliński, Anna Skałba and Magdalena Wrembel The perception of gradient acceptability among L one Polish monolingual and bilingual speakers
Abstract: Gradient acceptability, which characterizes partially acceptable constructions within a given population of speakers, is a phenomenon whose cognitive underpinnings are yet to be fully understood. In this paper we share insights from a study where the causes of gradient acceptability were investigated from a language-external, speaker-oriented perspective. Specifically, we tested whether the mono- and bilingual status and age play a role in the perception of partially acceptable subject-oriented possessive pronouns and post-verbal adverb placement in Polish. To that end, we performed an acceptability judgement task involving four groups of native speakers of Polish, differing in bilingual status and age. The data were analyzed with mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression models. The results showed that only age was a significant predictor of the ratings of ungrammatical sentences with subject-oriented possessive pronouns. Conversely, the ratings of sentences with adverb placement were influenced by bilingual status. While the findings may be partly explained by different sources of partial acceptability in the two tested constructions, they also show that age and bilingual status impact different areas of cognitive processing.
One Introduction
One Introduction
The notion of gradient acceptability emphasizes the fluidity of acceptability judgements and the role of partial acceptability, often annotated in studies with symbols like a question mark, reflecting the indeterminacy in how language users perceive and evaluate sentences or other linguistic units. Although theories of grammar often rely on idealizations, such as the binary distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical or acceptable and unacceptable, actual language users can provide a spectrum of acceptability judgments for identical structures, regardless of their formal grammatical classification. Recent years have witnessed a growing body of literature exploring the nature of linguistic gradience. While most of these studies adopt a language-internal perspective, aiming to identify linguistic factors influencing gradient judgments, this paper takes a language-external and speaker-oriented approach to exploring the sources of gradience.
The primary objective of this article is to empirically assess the claim, found in language acquisition studies, that bilingual or multilingual individuals tend to be more tolerant of gradience also termed as optionality in their native language. Apart from bilingual status, we also consider age as a relevant variable which may influence the perception of gradient acceptability. This is partly motivated by the fact that older generations of Polish speakers, typically in their late forties and older, are more likely to be functionally monolingual, providing an opportunity to investigate the impact of bilingualism. However, age is also relevant due to a commonly held belief, now to be empirically confirmed, that older generations of speakers tend to hold more conservative linguistic judgments compared to younger ones.
This work is directly inspired by the interim findings of a previous longitudinal study in which we examined the cross-linguistic influence of Polish the first language and English the second language in the acquisition of Norwegian the third language. During the pilot phase of testing Polish constructions for the prior study, we identified a partially acceptable distribution of possessive pronouns in positions that, according to prescriptive rules, would typically require reflexive possessive pronouns. The situation was further complicated by discrepancies in acceptability judgments identified between participants, who were primarily students in their early twenties, and some research team members, who were in their forties and older. It became clear that the issue required further investigation, and this article aims to provide a deeper understanding of bilingual status and age as factors influencing partial acceptability in a broader context.