Terrapins at the 50th BUCLD

On modals, wh-movement, crossover, definites, aspect, attitudes and more.

November 6-9 we witness the annual migration of the Maryland Terrapin to Boston, which - now for the 50th time! - hosts the Boston University Conference on Language Development. There are at least a dozen talks by current Marylanders and more from alums, past visitors and collaborators. Representing the Linguistics Department are graduate students Joselyn, Katherine, Elizabeth and Will; undergraduate Alex Emmert; faculty Jeff, Valentine, Colin, Naomi and Alexander; PhD alums Jack Ying *25 (CUHK), Anouk Dieuleveut *21 (Geneva), Rodrigo Ranero *21 (UCLA), Laurel Perkins *19 (UCLA), Rachel Dudley *17 (UCSD), Julie Gerard *16 (Ulster), Kaitlyn Harrigan *15 (William & Mary); former visiting PhD students Lyn Tieu (Toronto) and Alice Jesus; undergraduate alum Lilliana Righter '20 (Harvard); former HESP postdoc Meg Cychosz (Stanford); and Baggett alum Elika Bergelson (Harvard). Representing other units on campus are at least Sophie Domanski, Zhiyi Wu, Gavkhar Abdurokhmonova, So Yeon Shin and Alexus Ramirez; and Yi Ting Huang, Nan Jiang, and Rachel Romeo.

Talks

• Joselyn Rodriguez, Patrick Shafto and Naomi Feldman  / Second Language Speech Assimilation in an Optimal Transport Framework
• Katherine Howitt, Colin Phillips and Jeffrey Lidz / Strong Crossover, weak evidence: 4 year old's knowledge of the strong crossover constraint
• Alex Emmert, Lillianna Righter, Erin E. Campbell, Derek Houston and Elika Bergelson / Comparing speech environments of children with cochlear implants and typically-hearing children
• Yuanfan Ying, Alexander Williams and Jeffrey Lidz / Bootstrapping “the”-meaning in early experience: Longitudinal study at 14 and 20 months
• Oana Lungu, Anouk Dieuleveut, Valentine Hacquard and Ailis Cournane / Children’s Understanding of Necessity Modals: Evidence from French
• Erin R. Mauffray, Victoria Mateu and Rodrigo Ranero / Ellipsis in contact: VPE and sluicing in Spanish heritage speakers
• Laurel Perkins and Jeffrey Lidz / Wh-dependency representations at 15 and 18 months: Evidence from subject and object wh-questions
• Anna Kispál, Ágnes Melinda Kovács and Rachel Dudley / Children’s understanding of factivity in Hungarian
• Juliana Gerard, Dana McDaniel and Adina Camelia Bleotu / In control or not? Acquisition of non-finite adjunct clauses in Romanian vs. English
• Sophie Domanski, James Harvey, Kuan-Jung Huang and Yi Ting Huang / Unreliable Estimates: Child-Level Dif erences in LENA Adult Word Count Accuracy
• Kuan-Jung Huang, Roger P. Levy and Yi Ting Huang / Using neural language model surprisal to study child sentence processing
• Gavkhar Abdurokhmonova, Alicia Mortimer and Rachel R. Romeo / Investigating bilingual advantage in selective attention activation from early childhood to adolescence: A museum-based fNIRS study
• Alexus G. Ramirez, So Yeon Shin, Brenda Jones Harden, Tiffany Martoccio, Lisa Berlin and Rachel R. Romeo / Investigating education and psychosocial factors as predictors of maternal speech among low-income Latinx families
• Emma Montilla, Arjun Pawar and Meg Cychosz / How does speech input impact children’s phonological processing skills?
• Meg Cychosz, Anele Villanueva and Adriana Weisleder / Child-directed speech and its relationship to infant vocal development in Bolivia and the United States

Posters

• Alice Margarida Jesus, Elizabeth Swanson, Jeffrey Lidz and Valentine Hacquard / Temporal orientation is a robust cue to attitude verb class in child-directed speech
• Elizabeth Swanson, William Vincent Zumchak, Jeffrey Lidz and Valentine Hacquard / Four-year-olds comprehend tense/aspect markers in finite and nonfinite embedded clauses
• Megan Kanaby, Rhosean Asmah, Sophie Domanski, Arynn S. Byrd, Jonet Artis, Erica Jackson and Yi Ting Huang / Understanding barriers in research participation: A case study on SES variation in language development
• Megan Gotowski and Kaitlyn Harrigan / Subcategorizing Adjectives with Multiple Frames
• Kaitlyn Harrigan, Sadhwi Srinivas, Aidan Burnham and Nicholas Voivoda / Hierarchical biases across frames
• Lyn Tieu and Petra Schulz / Understanding sentences with focus particles using visual alternatives: Children do not ignore "only"
• Andre Eliatamby and Lyn Tieu / Children compute more ad-hoc implicatures from "a" than "the": On the interaction of definiteness and ad-hoc implicatures
• Alyssa Vorobey and Lyn Tieu / Information packaging in child language: Comparing asserted to presupposed and implicated information
• Maria Astapova and Lyn Tieu / On children's acquisition of disjunction in French: A corpus study in French: A corpus study
• Zhiyi Wu and Nan Jiang / Examining within-language semantic priming in Chinese-English bilinguals using L1-derived word associations
• Carissa Ott and Meg Cychosz / Connecting preschoolers' spontaneous speech to future language skills: A longitudinal cohort study of canonical proportion as a developmental index