On Elicited Data in Sign Language Syntax

Abstract

We present a proof of concept that sign language elicited data are as reliable as experimentaldata. We use data reported in the recently published reference grammar of ItalianSign Language (Branchini and Mantovan 2020) to create a formal experiment contrastinggrammatical sentences with sentences that minimally violate the rule. On aforced-choice task, participants prefer sentences that follow the rule significantly moreoften than sentences that violate it. The experimental results obtained in this studyproves that elicited data are reliable.