Equivocal evidence on field-dependence effects in sentence judgments

The study reported here examined field-dependence effects on judgments of g rammaticality. Several sentence types involving coordinate structures were used. The types me tested were based on examples such as, The patients pret ended chat Elinor injured themselves and the dietician. Earlier work shows that the presence of the coordinate structures (themselves and the dieticia n) greatly improves acceptability of apparently ungrammatical sentences suc h as this. The present results show no reliable differences in the over-all pattern of judgments with these and related coordinate structures for subj ects classified as field-dependent and field-independent; how ever, some in triguing differences in pattern were nonetheless apparent across subject ty pes, although they were not reliable in all relevant tests. In addition to reliable differences in gross response level, field-dependent people showed an attenuation of certain differences noted for field-independent people. Thus, our results constitute equivocal evidence of differences in the gramm atical preferences of field-dependent and field-independent people. We argu e, however, that these results reflect differences in the processing styles of the two types of individuals, not differences in the principles or logi c implemented by the grammatical systems of the two types.