Valentine at Penn

Must the force be with you?

Friday January 26, Valentine is in Philadelphia, presenting a talk on her research at the Seminar for the ILST (Integrated Language Sciences and Technology), the language-directed wing of the University of Pennsylvania's MindCORE Center, co-directed by John Trueswell and Charles Yang. Valentine's talk, "Must the force be with you?", addresses the difficulties young children seem to have with using modal verbs (like "must" and "might"), and offers hypotheses about how they are overcome. Her abstract is below.

Children have been shown to struggle with the force of modals: they tend to accept possibility modals (like might) in environments where adults prefer necessity modals (like must), and necessity modals in environments where adults require possibility modals. In this talk, I present various studies which test the robustness of children’s modal difficulties, probe the potential linguistic and nonlinguistic sources of these difficulties, and point to how children eventually overcome them.