Can I suggest you seek advice from some professionals who are experienced in crafting “plain English” for non-native speakers? — descriptive and theoretical linguists may not be the best people to write such text.

There are even ethical issues in research with nonhumans and inanimate objects, even in fields like astrophysics, molecular biology, volcanology, and other such sciences. People working in those fields are usually much less sensitive to ethical problems and I’ve found that they’re often surprised when they discover how important ethics is in the human sciences. The IRB knows this and usually has an attitude where they expect every researcher to try to sweep problems under the rug. Being forthright and explicit about ethical issues comes as a breath of fresh air for them, according to a few IRB members I’ve talked to.

Another solution is to use pseudonyms and make real names available only by request. This maintains the speaker relationships in the published data, but relieves some of the identity problems. Pseudonyms are likely to be deciphered by a small population, however.

One solution that could work but could also potentially cause a lot of problems is to have the people who want to be identified confront the previous participants who wanted to be anonymous. Both groups are likely to have far more understanding of the problem than the linguist does. But the researcher needs to be very careful in not letting the discussion turn into something that tears the community apart. It would help if the linguist has extensive experience in the community and is highly respected, since a newcomer would be far less likely to know how to handle a rancorous debate. The presence of other highly respected community members is essential for the discussion as well.

Alternatively, the discussion and decision could be handed over to a community leader so that both sides are obligated to come to consensus. The basic idea here is to not make up things as one goes, but to follow established procedures in the community for resolving disputes and disagreements. In other words, let them sort it out on their own terms, and go with whatever they decide.

The simplest solution is to restrict access to the recordings, however this is rather unsatisfying. If the research language has a large population, it’s easy enough for other researchers to replicate the data and so restricting access is not really a problem. But if the language isn’t widely spoken then data access is crucial for verifiable replication of measurement. So the data need to be public.

Interestingly, there’s an opposite balance to this issue. If the language is widely spoken then it may be more likely for an individual to be recognized by others, since the individual probably knows more people being from a large population. In contrast, if the language is not widely spoken then the individual is not likely to be known by more than a few people, although it’s much more likely that other speakers will know the individual.

Since recordings for phonetics are oftentimes rather innocuous, the issue of possible identification of anonymous participants is usually unimportant. Nobody particularly cares that the participant said “a merry melon a mile long” five times. The only people who might have serious concerns are those who are worried about their privacy, and if they are fully informed about access to the data then they’ll remove themselves from the project. So the important issue for the IRB then is that withdrawal from participation is made clear for the participants. The same is true for participants who speak languages with small populations.

There’s also the complicated situation where a researcher is working with a community who barely understands electricity, much less something like scientific research, the Internet, and so forth. But that’s a fundamentally different problem that I’ll leave to people who’ve worked in such situations.

[BTW, I’d really like it if there was a way to preview comments before submitting them...]

You’re right about “intervention” not applying, so the only part of the definition that matters is “data through interaction with the individual”. Now, the way that data are obtained from individuals will vary from project to project, but from what I’ve seen the process is usually pretty dull and unthreatening. Usually just describing the manner of how the data are obtained is enough to convince the IRB that there’s no review required. The only thing that they might seriously be concerned about is what the reward for participation is, and how it’s conferred.

In either case, an IRB would be draconian if it required such a project to undergo anything more extensive than expedited review. If similar projects have been done by the department in the past, then it’s usually just a matter of attaching the IRB’s prior consideration and claiming that the new project is substantially similar. This oftentimes results in an exemption.

The first is that such proposals are subject to review because they involve human participants in an experiment designed to elicit generalizable information about human behavior. This makes grammaticality judgment tasks a type of psychological research.

The second is that these are tasks designed to get information about an abstract system where there is no personal identifiable information about the human participant; they are providing information about language, not undergoing any intervention.

In the first case, the IRB decides the proposal is subject to expedited review (or exemption following a brief review); in the second, it’s decided that the research does not fall within the bounds of IRB review.

It strikes me that either of these views could be argued for.

Society seems to have a disposition towards veto rights, ie. anything is fair game unless it a passive or active participant objects.

What about the rights of the participants to be recognised for their work? When is issuing a veto immoral?