NSF grant to Laurel and Jeff

Non-local syntactic dependency acquisition in infancy.

Congratulations to Jeff Lidz and alum Laurel Perkins *19, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCLA, who have been awarded a pair of collaborative NSF grants (2236013 and 2236014) for their project on “Non-local syntactic dependency acquisition in infancy," developing work started in Laurel's dissertation. The project addresses three questions. Do infants represent wh-dependencies as dependencies over strings or over more richly defined grammatical structures? What mechanisms drive the acquisition of these dependencies? And what consequences does early syntactic knowledge have for further language learning, such as the acquisition of verb meaning? We look forward to lots of cool work in syntax and acquisition coming out of this project over the next five years!