You may do at most one HIT in this batch. We will reject submissions beyond the first.

In this experiment you will be asked to read some sentences. First you will see some lines like this:

_____ _______ ________ ___________ _____________ __________

These dashes are covering the words in the sentence. When you press the space bar, the first word will appear. With every press of the space bar, a new word will appear. You should try to read as naturally as possible, making sure that you understand what you read.

After reading the sentence, you will then be asked two questions regarding that sentence.

The first question will be about whether something happened or not. Your task will be to respond yes (by pressing the "1" key), maybe or maybe not (by pressing the "2" key), or no (by pressing the "3" key) to the question, assuming that the sentence is true.

For instance, you might get the sentence John managed to take out the trash and the question Did John take out the trash? In this case, you would respond yes (by pressing "1"), since if someone manages to take out the trash, that person has to have taken out the trash.

If the sentence were John failed to take out the trash and the question were the same, you would respond no (by pressing "3").

And if the sentence were John wanted to take out the trash and the question were the same, you might respond maybe or maybe not (by pressing "2").

We've included some sentences that may sound unacceptable. An "acceptable" sentence is something a native speaker of English would say, even if the situation the sentence describes sounds vague or implausible. Part of the task will include saying whether the bolded sentence is acceptable, where "1" is least acceptable and "7" is most acceptable. As for the first question, you should use the keyboard to give your acceptability judgment.

For instance, if you got the sentence John wanted it to snow, you might say that it may or may not have snowed and that that sentence is perfectly acceptable (by pressing "7").

But if you got the sentence John wanted that it snowed, you might say that that sentence is pretty unacceptable (for instance, by pressing "1" or "2"). Regardless of how acceptable the sentence is, you should still answer the first question to the best of your ability. So for instance, you might again say that is may or may not have snowed.

Try to answer both questions as quickly and accurately as possible. If you are unsure of the response (or if you think that more than one is right), try to pick the best answer.

Not all questions have correct answers, but a subset in each HIT do. Prior to approval, we check the answers given for this subset. We will reject work containing a substantial number of answers that do not agree with the correct answer.

When the experiment is over, a screen will appear telling you that you are done, and a submission button will be revealed.

This research is being carried out by Dr. Aaron White at the University of Rochester. You can read more about the study here.