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
Associate Professor, Linguistics
1413 A Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Colin Phillips
Professor, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Linguistics
1413 F Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Andrea Zukowski
Research Scientist, Linguistics
1413 Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Secondary Faculty
Valentine Hacquard
Professor, Linguistics
Affliliate Professor, Philosophy
1401 F Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
William Idsardi
Professor, Linguistics
1401 A Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Alexander Williams
Associate Professor, Linguistics
Associate Professor, Philosophy
1401 D Marie Mount Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
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ActivitiesExplore more of our research activities.
Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping
Syntactic and pragmatic cues to the meanings of modal and attitude verbs.
Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word’s meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING. But while formal theories argue for principled links between meaning and syntax, actual syntactic evidence about meaning is noisy and highly abstract. This paper examines the role that syntactic bootstrapping can play in learning modal and attitude verb meanings, for which the physical context is especially uninformative. I argue that abstract syntactic classifications are useful to the child, but that something further is both necessary and available. I examine how pragmatic and syntactic cues can combine in mutually constraining ways to help learners infer attitude meanings, but need to be supplemented by semantic information from the lexical context in the case of modals.
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Parser-Grammar Transparency and the Development of Syntactic Dependencies
Learning a grammar is sufficient for learning to parse.
A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in developmental time to demonstrate that as new grammatical knowledge becomes available to children, they use that knowledge in their incremental parsing decisions. Given the tight link between the acquisition of new knowledge and the use of that knowledge in recognizing sentence structure, I argue in favor of a tight link between grammatical structure and parsing mechanics.
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Figuring out root and epistemic uses of modals: The role of input
How children use temporal orientation to infer which uses of modals are epistemic and which are not.
This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input children hear may help or hinder them in uncovering the flavor flexibility of modals. Our results show that the way parents use modals may obscure the fact that they can express epistemic flavors: modals are very rarely used epistemically. Yet, children eventually figure it out; our results suggest that some do so even before age 3. To investigate how children pick up on epistemic flavors, we explore distributional cues that distinguish roots and epistemics. The semantic literature argues they differ in “temporal orientation” (Condoravdi, 2002): while epistemics can have present or past orientation, root modals tend to be constrained to future orientation (Werner 2006; Klecha, 2016; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2018). We show that in child-directed speech, this constraint is well-reflected in the distribution of aspectual features of roots and epistemics, but that the signal might be weak given the strong usage bias towards roots. We discuss (a) what these results imply for how children might acquire adult-like modal representations, and (b) possible learning paths towards adult-like modal representations.
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