Language Acquisition
The field of language acquisition examines the interaction between children and their environment in the acquisition of a first language.
Language acquisitionists at Maryland are working toward explicit models of the innate contribution of the learner and how this contribution makes it possible for learners to construct a specific grammar of the language to which they are exposed. Because learning mechanisms rely in part on real-time sentence understanding mechanisms, acquisitionists at Maryland are working to specify how psycholinguistic processing contributes to language learning.
In addition, because the acquisition of linguistic meaning depends on understanding the cognitive systems that interface with language, a growing research area in the department examines the interplay between cognitive and linguistic development. Formally explicit computational models are becoming a widely applied research tool in language acquisition at Maryland. Such models make explicit the relative contribution of the learner and the environment and make it possible to compare alternative hypotheses in novel ways.
Finally, our research is conducted in a broadly cross-linguistic context, helping us identify how the language learning capacity is robust to the wide range of variation found in the world's languages. Languages we have investigated include: English, Ewe, Kannada, Korean, Mandarin, Norwegian, Tagalog, Tsez and Japanese. Recent areas of interest include binding constraints, quantification, argument structure, A-bar movement, noun-class learning, phrase structure, attitude verbs, modals, presupposition, implicature, and the relation between clause type and speech act category.
Primary Faculty
Naomi Feldman
Professor, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
Professor, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
1413 A Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Jeffrey Lidz
Professor and Chair, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1413 Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Colin Phillips
Professor, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
Director, Language Science Center
1413 F Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Andrea Zukowski
Research Scientist, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1413 Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Secondary Faculty
Valentine Hacquard
Professor, Linguistics
Affliliate Professor, Philosophy
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1401 F Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
William Idsardi
Professor, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science
CLaME: Max Planck • NYU Center for Language Music and Emotion
1401 A Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Alexander Williams
Associate Professor, Linguistics
Associate Professor, Philosophy
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1401 D Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
ActivitiesExplore more of our research activities.
Thematic Content, Not Number Matching, Drives Syntactic Bootstrapping
Toddlers do not expect the structure of a sentence to match the structure of the concept under which they view its referent.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey Lidz, Alexander WilliamsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Laurel Perkins *19, Tyler Knowlton *21
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.
Read More about Thematic Content, Not Number Matching, Drives Syntactic Bootstrapping
Language Discrimination May Not Rely on Rhythm: A Computational Study
Challenging the relationship between rhythm and language discrimination in infancy.
Contributor(s): Leslie Ruolan Li, Naomi FeldmanNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Abi Aboelata (UMD), Thomas Schatz (Marseilles)
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,
Read More about Language Discrimination May Not Rely on Rhythm: A Computational Study
Visual perception supports 4-place event representations: A case study of TRADING
Can adults visually represent a trading as a single event with four participants?
Contributor(s): Alexander Williams, Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Ekaterina Khylstova (UCLA), Laurel Perkins (UCLA)
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.
Read More about Visual perception supports 4-place event representations: A case study of TRADING