Hacquard headlines Heimfest

Questions in acquisition.

Saturday December 7, Valentine is up at MIT, presenting a talk on "Questions in acquisition" at a special one-day symposium in honor of Irene Heim, batting clean up after fellow presenters Matt Mandelkern, Luka Crnič, Maribel Romero and Wataru Uegaki. 

The talk describes joint work with Jeff, Elizabeth, Dan Goodhue and Yu'an Yang on how children figure out the clause types of their language and which speech act each is canonically used to perform. The work includes experiments suggesting that children have linked interrogatives with questions and declaratives with assertions by 18 months, as well as corpus analyses and computational modeling of child-directed speech showing how learners can figure out this link by drawing on pragmatic and syntactic information. The hypothesis is, infants figure out form and function in tandem, with their growing knowledge of each mutually constraining the other.