Aaron White *15 in Glossa Psycholinguistics with Jeff Lidz

Children use verb-specific distributional information to make predictions in online parsing.

Check out "Lexicalization in the developing parser" in Glossa Psycholinguistics by Jeff Lidz with 2015 alum Aaron Steven White, now Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester. The paper, based on work started when Aaron was at Maryland, uses children's behavior in noun-learning tasks to argue that they make syntactic predictions in online comprehension, based on distributional patterns specific to the verb, but do not generalize the pattern to other verbs.

Glossa Psycholinguistics is a new journal founded in part by Linguistics alum Brian Dillon *11, Associate Professor of Linguistics at UMass Amherst.

Lexicalization in the developing parser

We use children's noun learning as a probe into the nature of their syntactic prediction mechanism and the statistical knowledge on which that prediction mechanism is based. We focus on verb-based predictions, considering two possibilities: children's syntactic predictions might rely on distributional knowledge about specific verbs–i.e. they might be lexicalized–or they might rely on distributional knowledge that is general to all verbs. In an intermodal preferential looking experiment, we establish that verb-based predictions are lexicalized: children encode the syntactic distributions of specific verbs and use those distributions to make predictions, but they do not assume that these can be assumed of verbs in general.