3.1.2. Participants

3.1.1. Participants

I conducted the experiment with two groups of participants. The first group comprises 43 pupils1 from a grammar school in North-Rhine Westphalia. They attend classes in the eleventh grade, are aged between 15 and 18 years and have been learning English for between seven and nine years. Only German native speakers were included because this makes it possible to draw inferences about the influence of the mother tongue on the choice of the dative form. The majority of the pupils (55.82%) cannot remember whether they discussed syntactic structures for verbs such as give, and those who state that they did do not remember any rules. Apparently, the subject is treated in little detail at school, or not at all. Thus, the pupils have to rely on their intuitions in rating the naturalness of the datives.

The second group of participants contains students of English from the University of Bamberg. They are aged between 18 and 25 years and study English mostly as their major subject (83.78%). Again, only German native speakers were included. Most students did not attend a syntax class in the course of their studies (64.86%), and those who did cannot remember the subject of dative alternation. Hence, the students do not have prior knowledge about the subject, either.

The participants differ in the degree to which they have been exposed to the English language. The pupils have obtained a mandatory basic education, whereas the students pursue an academic education in this field. I did not differentiate further according to age, gender, etc. because this would have created smaller, less representative subgroups.

1  The participants attending school are referred to as ‘pupils’, those attending university as ‘students’.

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