Jeffrey Lidz

Professor, Linguistics
jlidz@umd.edu
1413 Marie Mount Hall
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Research Expertise
Language Acquisition
Psycholinguistics
Syntax
Publications
Null Objects in Korean: Experimental Evidence for the Argument Ellipsis Analysis
Experimental evidence supports an analysis of Null Object constructions in Korean as instances of object ellipsis.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Chung-hye Han, Kyeong-min Kim, Keir Moulton
Dates:
Null object (NO) constructions in Korean and Japanese have receiveddifferent accounts: as (a) argument ellipsis (Oku 1998, S. Kim 1999, Saito 2007, Sakamoto 2015), (b) VP-ellipsis after verb raising (Otani and Whitman 1991, Funakoshi 2016), or (c) instances of base-generated pro (Park 1997, Hoji 1998, 2003). We report results from two experiments supporting the argument ellipsis analysis for Korean. Experiment 1 builds on K.-M. Kim and Han’s (2016) finding of interspeaker variation in whether the pronoun ku can be bound by a quantifier. Results showed that a speaker’s acceptance of quantifier-bound ku positively correlates with acceptance of sloppy readings in NO sentences. We argue that an ellipsis account, in which the NO site contains internal structure hosting the pronoun, accounts for this correlation. Experiment 2, testing the recovery of adverbials in NO sentences, showed that only the object (not the adverb) can be recovered in the NO site, excluding the possibility of VP-ellipsis. Taken together, our findings suggest that NOs result from argument ellipsis in Korean.
Hope for syntactic bootstrapping
Some mental state verbs take a finite clause as their object, while others take an infinitive, and the two groups differ reliably in meaning. Remarkably, children can use this correlation to narrow down the meaning of an unfamiliar verb.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Kaitlyn Harrigan (*15)
Dates:
We explore children’s use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want, and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but have syntactic distributions predictive of semantic properties, we hypothesize that syntax may serve as an important cue to learning their meanings. Using a novel methodology, we replicate previous literature showing an asymmetry between acquisition of think and want, and we additionally demonstrate that interpretation of a less frequent attitude verb, hope, patterns with type of syntactic complement. This supports the view that children treat syntactic frame as informative about an attitude verb’s meaning
Filler-gap dependency comprehension at 15 months: The role of vocabulary
New evidence from preferential looking suggests that 15 month olds can correctly understand wh-questions and relative clauses under certain experimental conditions, but perhaps only by noticing that a verb is missing an expected dependent.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Laurel Perkins (*19)
Dates:
15-month-olds behave as if they comprehend filler-gap dependencies such as wh-questions and relative clauses. On one hypothesis, this success does not reflect adult-like representations but rather a “gap-driven” interpretation heuristic based on verb knowledge. Infants who know that feed is transitive may notice that a predicted direct object is missing in Which monkey did the frog feed __? and then search the display for the animal that got fed. This gap-driven account predicts that 15-month-olds will perform accurately only if they know enough verbs to deploy this interpretation heuristic; therefore, performance should depend on vocabulary. We test this prediction in a preferential looking task and find corroborating evidence: Only 15-month-olds with higher vocabulary behave as if they comprehend wh-questions and relative clauses. This result reproduces the previous finding that 15-month-olds can identify the right answer for wh-questions and relative clauses under certain experimental contexts, and is moreover consistent with the gap-driven heuristic account for this behavior.
Learning, memory and syntactic bootstrapping: A meditation
Do children learning words rely on memories for where they have heard the word before? Jeff Lidz argues memory of syntactic context plays a larger role than memory for referential context.
Linguistics
Dates:
Prosody and Function Words Cue the Acquisition of Word Meanings in 18-Month-Old Infants
18-month-old infants use prosody and function words to recover the syntactic structure of a sentence, which in turn constrains the possible meanings of novel words the sentence contains.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Angela Xiaoxue He (*15), Alex de Carvalho, Anne Christophe
Dates:
Language acquisition presents a formidable task for infants, for whom word learning is a crucial yet challenging step. Syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) has been robustly shown to be a cue to word meaning. But how can infants access syntactic information when they are still acquiring the meanings of words? We investigated the contribution of two cues that may help infants break into the syntax and give a boost to their lexical acquisition: phrasal prosody (speech melody) and function words, both of which are accessible early in life and correlate with syntactic structure in the world’s languages. We show that 18-month-old infants use prosody and function words to recover sentences’ syntactic structure, which in turn constrains the possible meanings of novel words: Participants (N = 48 in each of two experiments) interpreted a novel word as referring to either an object or an action, given its position within the prosodic-syntactic structure of sentences.
The importance of input representations
Learning from data is not incompatible with approaches that attribute rich initial linguistic knowledge to the learner. On the contrary, such approaches must still account for how knowledge guides learners in using their data to infer a grammar.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Laurel Perkins (*19)
Dates:
Language learners use the data in their environment in order to infer the grammatical system that produced that data. Yang (2018) makes the important point that this process requires integrating learners’ experiences with their current linguistic knowledge. A complete theory of language acquisition must explain how learners leverage their developing knowledge in order to draw further inferences on the basis of new data. As Yang and others have argued, the fact that input plays a role in learning is orthogonal to the question of whether language acquisition is primarily knowledge-driven or data-driven (J. A. Fodor, 1966; Lidz & Gagliardi, 2015; Lightfoot, 1991; Wexler & Culicover, 1980). Learning from data is not incompatible with approaches that attribute rich initial linguistic knowledge to the learner. On the contrary, such approaches must still account for how knowledge guides learners in using their data to infer a grammar.
The explanatory power of linguistic theory
Jeff Lidz details evidence for the Predicate Internal Subject Hypothesis, and shows how its abstractness supports the "considerable sophistication" that the Chomskyan tradition imputes to the child learner.
Linguistics
Dates:
The scope of children’s scope: Representation, parsing and learning
What do young children know about quantifier scope?
Linguistics
Dates:
Similarity-based interference and the acquisition of adjunct control
Kids sometimes make errors in interpreting the understood subject of adjunct predicate, like "before leaving." Julie Gerard argues that these errors may result, not from a non-adultlike grammar, but from mistakes in sentence processing.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Juliana Gerard
Dates:
The role of incremental parsing in syntactically conditioned word learning
The girl is tapping with the tig. If you don't know what "tig" means, you'll look to what the girl is using to tap. And so will even very young children.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Aaron Steven White, Rebecca Baier
Dates:
Verb learning in 14- and 18-month-old English-learning infants
Ordinarily, verbs in English label events while nouns do not. Angela He and Jeff Lidz show that even 18-month-olds can use this correlation to infer the meanings of novel words, given the understanding that "is _ ing" is a context for verbs.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Angela He
Dates:
Language Acquisition
A handbook chapter on first language acquisition, aimed at the independent contributions of experience, domain-specific biases, priorknowledge and extralinguistic cognition in shaping how a grammar grows inside the mind of a child.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Laurel Perkins
Dates:
On how verification tasks are related to verification procedures: A reply to Kotek et al.
How do we mentally represent the meaning of "most"? Here Tim Hunter clarifies the goals of Jeff Lidz and Paul Pietroski's project to answer this question, in respsonse to misunderstandings.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Tim Hunter, Darko Odic, Alexis Wellwood
Dates:
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
An esssential compendium of contemporary research in language acquisition.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): William Snyder, Joe Pater
Dates:
NPI licensing and beyond: Children's knowledge of the semantics of "any"
Visitor Lyn Tieu and mentor Jeff Lidz investigate preschooler's understanding of negative polarity items like "any".
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Lyn Tieu
Dates:
Discontinuous Development in the Acquisition of Filler-Gap Dependencies: Evidence from 15- and 20-Month-Olds
15-month-olds are able to understand relative clauses and wh-questions; but not by way of correctly representing their grammar.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Annie Gagliardi, Tara M. Mease
Dates:
Endogenous sources of variation in language acquisition
Jeff Lidz and collaborators investigate inter-speaker variation in the grammar of quantifier scope in Korean.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Chung-hye Han, Julien Musolino
Dates:
Syntactic and lexical inference in the acquisition of novel superlatives
Even four year olds are biased to think that determiners express relations between quantities, but lack the same bias for adjectives. How do they arrive at this bias?
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Alexis Wellwood, Annie Gagliardi
Dates:
Expanding our Reach and Theirs: When Linguists go to High School
A report on outreach to local schools by the community of language scientists at UMCP.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Yakov Kronrod
Dates:
How Nature Meets Nurture: Universal Grammar and Statistical Learning
Children acquire grammars on the basis of statistical information, interpreted through a system of linguistic representation that is substantially innate. Jeff Lidz and Annie Gagliardi propose a model of the process.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Annie Gagliardi
Dates:
Linking parser development to acquisition of syntactic knowledge
How does a child's acquisition of a grammar relate to development in their ability to parse and understand sentences in real time?
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Akira Omaki
Dates:
Statistical Insensitivity in the Acquisition of Tsez Noun Classes
How do children acquire noun classes? Annie Gagliardi and Jeff Lidz show that children acquiring Tsez are biased to use phonological over semantic cues, despite a statistical asymmetry in the other direction.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Annie Gagliardi
Dates:
Is she patting Katie? Constraints on pronominal reference in 30-month olds
Preferential looking studies show that, already at 30 months, children's understanding of pronouns in "Katie patted herself" and "She patted Katie" are already adult-like.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Anastacia Conroy, Cynthia Lukyanenko,
Dates:
Is she patting Katie? Constraints on pronominal reference in 30-month-olds
Preferential looking studies show that, already at 30 months, children's understanding of pronouns in "Katie patted herself" and "She patted Katie" are already adult-like.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Cynthia Lukyanenko,
Dates:
Parameters in Language Acquisition
"Parameters" are abstract features of grammar that govern many different observable structures and may vary across languages. Lisa Pearl and Jeff Lidz explore how this notion is used in theories of typology and acquisition.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Lisa Pearl
Dates:
Conservativity and Learnability of Determiners
Tim Hunter and Jeff Lidz find evidence that 4- to 5-year olds expect determiner meanings to be Conservative
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Tim Hunter
Dates:
Selective learning the acquisition of Kannada ditransitives
Even young children have a highly abstract representation of ditransitive syntax.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Joshua Viau
Dates:
Competence, Performance and the Locality of Quantifier Raising: Evidence from 4-year-old Children
Can quantifiers be interpreted outside of their own clause? Do the observed contraints have a grammatical source? Kristen Syrett and Jeff Lidz revisit these questions with experimental studies on the interpretation of ACD by both adults and children.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Kristen Syrett
Dates:
Language Learning and Language Universals
How do patterns in the environment interact with our innate capacities to produce our first languages?
Linguistics
Dates:
Restrictions on the Meaning of Determiners: Typological Generalisations and Learnability
Are nonconservative meanings for determiners unlearnable? And what about a determiner that means 'less than half'?
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Tim Hunter, Alexis Wellwood, Anastasia Conroy
Dates:
Priming of abstract logical representations in 4-year-olds
"Every horse did not jump over the fence." Preschoolers tend to hear this as meaning that none did. But the preference is not grammatical, as it can be reduced either by priming or changes to the context.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Joshua Viau, Julien Musolino
Dates:
Though preschoolers in certain experimental contexts strongly prefer to interpret ambiguous sentences containing quantified NPs and negation on the basis of surface syntax (e.g., Musolino’s (1998) “observation of isomorphism”), contextual manipulations can lead to more adult-like behavior. But is isomorphism a purely pragmatic phenomenon, as recently proposed? In Experiment 1, we begin by isolating the contextual factor responsible for children’s improvement in Musolino and Lidz (2006). We then demonstrate in Experiment 2 that this factor can be used to prime inverse scope interpretations. To remove pragmatics from the equation altogether, we show in Experiment 3 that the same effect can be achieved via semantic priming. Our results represent the first clear evidence for priming of the abstract logico-syntactic structures underlying these interpretations and, thus, highlight the importance of language processing alongside pragmatic reasoning during children’s linguistic development.
When Domain General Learning Succeeds and When it Fails
Learning how to interpret anaphoric "one" requires domain-specific mechanisms.
Linguistics
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Lisa Pearl
Dates: