This article examines sentence matching, a methodology frequently used in
the second language (L2) literature to determine notions of grammaticality
of nonnative speakers (NNS). Native speakers (NS) of French and L2
learners of French performed a sentence-matching task focusing on three
areas of French grammar: adverb placement, subject–verb agreement and
clitic-pronoun placement. In sentence-matching tasks participants respond
to two sentences on a computer screen indicating whether the two sentences
are identical or not. In general, grammatical sentences are responded to
faster than ungrammatical sentences and have been used in the L2 literature
as a way of determining grammatical knowledge. The results from the NSs
of French show that when there is a high degree of difficulty in interpretation
of ungrammatical sentences, sentence matching is a useful tool for
determining grammaticality. For NNSs there is little evidence that sentence
matching predicts grammaticality. A traditional acceptability judgement task
was administered to NNSs. Sentence-matching did not correlate with NNS’s
individual notions of grammaticality. Issues of proficiency level and the
nature of ungrammatical sentences are important determinants when
considering the validity of sentence-matching as a research tool.

Sentence matching: a re-examination PDF

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