Language production experiments as tools for corpus construction: A contrastive study of complementizer agreement

Abstract The investigation of linguistic phenomena in corpora of spontaneous speech is sometimes hindered by corpus size or by the complexity of the factors influencing their occurrence. Language Production Experiments (LPEs) can specifically elicit such phenomena and can therefore be used to build corpora that allow for their investigation. Yet experiments are a wide category that covers very different tasks, and there is little empirical research that compares speakers’ response behavior to different task types. In this paper, we compare the responses of a group of 22 speakers to a translation task and a completion task, both of which target the syntactic phenomena complementizer agreement (CA). The results indicate that both experimental methods offer legitimate ways to investigate the phenomenon with specific advantages and disadvantages. However, a comparison of results from both tasks allows for insights that a single task could not have provided.