Mina speaking at Michigan State

Mina Hirzel is a special alumni speaker at the Michigan State Undergraduate Linguistics Conference, "Local and long distance dependencies in 16 to 20 month-olds."

April 20, Mina Hirzel is a special alumni speaker at the Michigan State Undergraduate Linguistics Conference, an event founded in 2010 by MSU and UMD alum Chris Heffner. Mina will present joint work with Laurel Perkins and Jeffrey Lidz, titled "Local and long distance dependencies in 16 to 20 month-olds." The talk asks when children come parse wh-questions in an adult-like manner. Prior work suggests that infants as young as 19 months can parse sentences incrementally and predictively, but recent findings with older children have not found evidence for predictive parsing of wh-object questions until 6 years of age. Mina's talk emphasizes the contribution of syntactic knowledge to parsing strategies in 16 month-olds, and preliminary data from 20-month-olds which provides new insight into infants' syntactic representations and also predictive parsing of wh-questions at this age.