Research

In acquiring a syntax, children must detect evidence for abstract structural dependencies that can be realized in variable ways in the surface forms of sentences. In What did David fix?, learners must identify a nonlocal relation between a fronted object of the verb (what) and the phonologically null ‘gap’ in canonical direct object position after the verb, where it is thematically interpreted. How do learners identify a nonadjacent dependency between an expression and something that has no overt phonological form? We propose that identifying abstract syntactic dependencies requires statistical inference over both overt linguistic material and unsatisfied grammatical expectations: noticing when a predicted argument for a verb is unexpectedly missing may serve as evidence for the gap of an argument movement dependency. We provide computational support for this hypothesis. We develop a learner that uses predicted but unexpectedly missing objects of verbs to identify possible gaps of object movement, and identifies which surface morphosyntactic properties of sentences are correlated with these possible movement gaps. We find that it is in principle possible for a learner using this mechanism to identify the majority of sentences with object movement in child-directed English, and that prior knowledge of which verbs require objects provides an important guide for identifying which surface distributions characterize object movement. This provides a computational account for why verb argument-structure knowledge developmentally precedes the acquisition of movement in a language like English. More broadly, these findings illustrate how statistical learning and learning from violated expectations can be combined to novel effect in the domain of language acquisition.

In syntactic bootstrapping, children draw on syntactic information to constrain their hypotheses about word meanings. We review evidence for syntactic bootstrapping, focusing primarily on the acquisition of verb meanings. For verbs describing physical actions, children can use the argument structure from event descriptions to zero in on the verb meaning. For attitude verbs, which refer to mental states, the syntactic distribution is informative about their semantics. By making use of systematic syntax-semantics correspondences, syntactic bootstrapping provides a foothold for word learning when cues from the physical world are underinformative.

This textbook introduces fundamental concepts and results in the theory of first language acquisition, bringing together linguistic phenomena on the one hand and learning and cognitive development on the other. Grammar and development are woven together through a range of case studies that provide students with the tools to think about (a) what is already understood about language acquisition; (b) what methods we use to identity children's grammatical knowledge; and (c) how to approach problems in any area of grammatical acquisition.

I explore what modification and negation tell us about the logical form of resultatives: a resultative relates the events of its two parts, but is a predicate of a third event, a change, equal to neither. This is important for explaining the construction—most significantly, the direct object restriction—and understanding how it differs from others that seem similar. It also shapes how we might use resultatives in the analysis of synthetic causatives.

Standard accounts of modals and conditionals fail to derive the correct meaning of anankastic conditionals like ‘If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train’, where it seems as if the modal in the consequent is restricted by the embedded complement of want (you go to Harlem), rather than by the whole antecedent (you want to go to Harlem). This has led to proposals for a special semantics for want (Condoravdi and Lauer, 2016) or a covert purpose clause associated with teleological (goal-oriented) modality (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2005). In this paper, we show that the apparent non-compositionality of anankastic conditionals is more general, and can be replicated with other modal flavors and attitude verbs: all can trigger what we call “harmonizing readings”. We offer a pragmatic account that generalizes across modal flavors and attitudes. Specifically, we argue that harmonizing arises when the meaning of the antecedent together with background assumptions gives rise to a modal inference that matches in flavor with the consequent modal. Our account predicts when harmonizing is possible and when it isn’t, without relying on any lexical or syntactic idiosyncrasies.

This article presents two experiments testing English children’s understanding of the “force” of modals, asking whether they understand that can expresses possibility and have_to expresses necessity. Prior studies show that children tend to over-accept necessity modals in possibility situations and argue this behavior stems from conceptual difficulties reasoning about open possibilities. However, these studies typically test modal force using epistemic modality (knowledge-based), which is less input-frequent than nonepistemic modalities (actual-world priorities or goals) and involves speaker perspective-taking. Our results with more familiar teleological (goal-oriented) modality show that preschoolers have an adult-like understanding of possibility can, but they seem to treat necessity have_to as a possibility modal, in affirmative (Experiment 1) and arguably in negative sentences (Experiment 2). We take these systematic errors to call into question conceptual accounts. We argue that younger preschoolers’ difficulties with modal force are due to word-learning challenges: They treat necessity modals as possibility modals.

In this paper, I discuss new data on wh-movement in the Francoprovençal language Valdôtain Patois (ValPa) in support of overt-covert movement: overt movement with deletion of higher copies. wh-phrases in ValPa can either be fronted or occur clause-internally. Based on empirical evidence, I argue that ValPa clause-internal wh-phrases do not appear in-situ, but rather are displaced to the Low Left Periphery at the edge of vP. Furthermore, using evidence from intervention effects, binding, inverse scope, and parasitic gaps, I argue that clause internal wh-phrases do not remain in the Low Left Periphery, but overtly move to the position they take scope in. The different word-orders are then derived via a copy deletion mechanism, meaning that the optionality is not accounted for in narrow syntax.

Children use correlations between the syntax of a clause and the meaning of its predicate to draw inferences about word meanings. On one proposal, these inferences are underwritten by a structural similarity between syntactic and semantic representations: learners expect that the number of clause arguments exactly matches the number of participant roles in the event concept under which its referent is viewed. We argue against this proposal, and in favor of a theory rooted in syntactic and semantic contents – in mappings from syntactic positions to thematic relations. We (i) provide evidence that infants view certain scenes under a concept with three participant relations (a girl taking a truck from a boy), and (ii) show that toddlers do not expect these representations to align numerically with clauses used to describe those scenes: they readily accept two-argument descriptions (“she pimmed the truck!”). This argues against syntactic bootstrapping theories underwritten by mappings between structural features of syntactic and semantic representations. Instead, our findings support bootstrapping based on grammatical and thematic content. Children’s earliest inferences may rely on the assumption that the syntactic asymmetry between subject and object correlates with a difference in how their referents relate to the event described by the sentence.

It has long been assumed that infants’ ability to discriminate between languages stems from their sensitivity to speech rhythm, i.e., organized temporal structure of vowels and consonants in a language. However, the relationship between speech rhythm and language discrimination has not been directly demonstrated. Here, we use computational modeling and train models of speech perception with and without access to information about rhythm. We test these models on language discrimination, and find that access to rhythm does not affect the success of the model in replicating infant language discrimination results. Our findings challenge the relationship between rhythm and language discrimination,

Events of social exchange, such as givings and tradings, are uniquely prevalent in human societies and cognitively privileged even at early stages of development. Such events may be represented as having 3 or even 4 participants. To do so in visual working memory would be at the limit of the system, which throughout development can track only 3 to 4 items. Using a case study of trading, we ask (i) whether adults can track all four participants in a trading scene, and (ii) whether they do so by chunking the scene into two giving events, each with 3 participants, to avoid placing the visual working memory system at its limit. We find that adults represent this scene under a 4-participant concept, and do not view the trade as two sequential giving events. We discuss further implications for event perception and verb learning in development.