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
Valentine Hacquard
Professor, Linguistics
Affliliate Professor, Philosophy
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
1401 F Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Jeffrey Lidz
Professor and Chair, Linguistics
College of Arts and Humanities
1413 Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Colin Phillips
Professor, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Linguistics
Member, Maryland 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
William Idsardi
Professor, Linguistics
College of Arts and Humanities
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
News
ActivitiesExplore more of our research activities.
Minding the Gap: Learning the surface forms of movement dependencies
Inferring the morphosyntactic footprint of violated distributional expectations.
Contributor(s): Naomi Feldman, Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Laurel Perkins *19 (UCLA)
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.
Read More about Minding the Gap: Learning the surface forms of movement dependencies
Syntactic Bootstrapping
A review of evidence for syntactic bootstrapping in the acquisition of verb meanings.
Author/Lead: Jeffrey Lidz, Elizabeth SwansonIn 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.
A Course in First Language Acquisition
Situating language acquisition at the intersection of theories of cognition, development, and grammar.
Author/Lead: Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Tyler Knowlton *21
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.