Research

Austronesian voice systems are not the result of syntactic ergativity.

A summary of major results in experimental work on ergative syntax, focussing on competition with accusative syntax, and the effects of ergativity on processing of long distance dependencies.

Valuation of features is neither overwriting nor sharing, but instead "union" of geometric structures.

Languages with Noun Incorporation may forbid this with the single argument of an unaccusative. For this reason, says Ted Levin, the work of the EPP cannot be done instead by a requirement for Case.

Accurately recognizing and resolving ambiguity is a hallmark of linguistic ability. English is a language with scope ambiguities in doubly-quantified sentences like A shark ate every pirate; this sentence can either describe a scenario with a single shark eating all of the pirates, or a scenario with many sharks—a potentially-different one eating each pirate. In Mandarin Chinese, the corresponding sentence is unambiguous, as it can only describe the single-shark scenario. We present experimental evidence to this effect, comparing native speakers of English with native speakers of Mandarin in their interpretations of doubly-quantified sentences. Having demonstrated the difference between these two languages in their ability for inverse scope interpretations, we then probe the robustness of the grammar of scope by extending our experiments to English-dominant adult heritage speakers of Mandarin. Like native speakers of Mandarin, heritage Mandarin speakers lack inverse scope in Mandarin. Crucially, these speakers also lack inverse scope in English, their dominant language in adulthood. We interpret these results as evidence for the pressure to simplify the grammar of scope, decreasing ambiguity when possible. In other words, when two systems meet—as in the case of heritage speakers—the simpler system prevails.

How do children learn a verb’s argument structure when their input contains nonbasic clauses that obscure verb transitivity? Here we present a new model that infers verb transitivity by learning to filter out non-basic clauses that were likely parsed in error. In simulations with childdirected speech, we show that this model accurately categorizes the majority of 50 frequent transitive, intransitive and alternating verbs, and jointly learns appropriate parameters for filtering parsing errors. Our model is thus able to filter out problematic data for verb learning without knowing in advance which data need to be filtered.

Children under 4 years of age often evaluate belief reports based on reality instead of beliefs. They tend to reject sentences like, “John thinks that giraffes have stripes” on the grounds that giraffes do not have stripes. Previous accounts have proposed that such judgments reflect immature Theory of Mind or immature syntactic/semantic representations. We argue that the difficulty is actually pragmatic. Adults frequently use belief reports to provide information about reality (e.g., “I think the stove is still hot”). Young children have difficulty determining when the main point is reality (the stove situation) vs. mental states (John’s ideas about giraffes). We show that if the context emphasizes beliefs, children are more able to evaluate belief reports appropriately (Experiment 1). The pattern of children’s truth value judgments demonstrates that they understand the literal meaning of think sentences, despite their pragmatic difficulty grasping the speaker’s intention (Experiment 2).

The present study investigates English-learning infants’ early understanding of the link between the grammatical category verb and the conceptual category event, and their ability to recruit morphosyntactic information online to learn novel verb meanings. We report two experiments using an infant-controlled Habituation-Switch Paradigm. In Experiment 1, we habituated 14- and 18-month-old infants with two scenes each labeled by a novel intransitive verb embedded in the frame “is ___ing”: a penguin-spinning scene paired with “it’s doking”, a penguin-cartwheeling scene paired with “it’s pratching”. At test, infants in both age groups dishabituated when the scene-sentence pairings got switched (e.g., penguin-spinning—“it’s pratching”). This finding is consistent with two explanations: (1) infants were able to link verbs to event concepts (as opposed to other concepts, e.g., objects) and (2) infants were simply tracking the surface-level mapping between scenes and sentences, and it was scene-sentence mismatch that elicited dishabituation, not their knowledge of verb-event link. In Experiment 2, we investigated these two possibilities, and found that 14-month-olds were sensitive to any type of mismatch, whereas 18-month-olds dishabituated only to a mismatch that involved a change in word meaning. Together, these results provide evidence that 18-month-old English-learning infants are able to learn novel verbs by recruiting morphosyntactic cues for verb categorization and use the verb-event link to constrain their search space of possible verb meanings.

A handbook chapter on first language acquisition, aimed at the independent contributions of experience, domain-specific biases, prior knowledge and extralinguistic cognition in shaping how a grammar grows inside the mind of a child.

This article explores what Noam Chomsky called ‘the argument from poverty of the stimulus’: the argument that our experience far underdetermines our knowledge and hence that our biological endowment is responsible for much of the derived state. It first frames the poverty of the stimulus argument either in terms of the set of sentences allowed by the grammar (its weak generative capacity) or the set of structures generated by the grammar (its strong generative capacity). It then considers the five steps to a poverty argument and goes on to discuss the possibility that children can learn via indirect negative evidence on the basis of Bayesian learning algorithms. It also examines structure dependence, polar interrogatives, and artificial phrase structure and concludes by explaining how Universal Grammar shapes the representation of all languages and enables learners to acquire the complex system of knowledge that undergirds the ability to produce and understand novel sentences.