Mayfest 2025 - Constraints on Meaning
When and why are certain meanings missing?
Research
Research at our top-ranked department spans syntax, semantics, phonology, language acquisition, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.
Connections between our core competencies are strong, with theoretical, experimental and computational work typically pursued in tandem.
A network of collaboration at all levels sustains a research climate that is both vigorous and friendly. Here new ideas develop in conversation, stimulated by the steady activity of our labs and research groups, frequent student meetings with faculty, regular talks by local and invited scholars and collaborations with the broader University of Maryland language science community, the largest and most integrated language science research community in North America.
Featured Research News
Language Acquisition
A handbook chapter on first language acquisition, aimed at the independent contributions of experience, domain-specific biases, priorknowledge and extralinguistic cognition in shaping how a grammar grows inside the mind of a child.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Laurel Perkins
Dates:
Publisher: WIley
Publisher: WIley
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.
Verb learning in 14- and 18-month-old English-learning infants
Ordinarily, verbs in English label events while nouns do not. Angela He and Jeff Lidz show that even 18-month-olds can use this correlation to infer the meanings of novel words, given the understanding that "is _ ing" is a context for verbs.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Angela He
Dates:
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.
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The argument from the poverty of the stimulus
Chomsky argued that our experience with language far underdetermines the knowledge we come to have of it, implicating an auxiliary role for language-specific structure in our biological endowment. Howard and Jeff review the issue.
Dates:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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.
The role of the IFG and pSTS in syntactic prediction: evidence from a parametric study of hierarchical structure in fMRI
Postdoc William Matchin, with Ellen Lau and Baggett Fellow Chris Hammerly, find a role for the anterior temporal lobe in semantic combination, and a role specifically in comprehension of thematic relations for the Angular Gyrus/Temporalparietal junction
Contributor(s): Ellen LauNon-ARHU Contributor(s): William Matchin, Chris Hammerly
Dates:
Sentences encode hierarchical structural relations among words. Several neuroimaging experiments aiming to localize combinatory operations responsible for creating this structure during sentence comprehension have contrasted short, simple phrases and sentences to unstructured controls. Some of these experiments have revealed activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), associating these regions with basic syntactic combination. However, the wide variability of these effects across studies raises questions about this interpretation. In an fMRI experiment, we provide support for an alternative hypothesis: these regions underlie top-down syntactic predictions that facilitate sentence processing but are not necessary for building syntactic structure. We presented stimuli with three levels of structure: unstructured lists, two-word phrases, and simple, short sentences; and two levels of content: natural stimuli with real words and stimuli with open-class items replaced with pseudowords (jabberwocky). While both the phrase and sentence conditions engaged syntactic combination, our experiment only encouraged syntactic prediction in the sentence condition. We found increased activity for both natural and jabberwocky sentences in the left IFG (pars triangularis and pars orbitalis) and pSTS relative to unstructured word lists and two-word phrases, but we did not find any such effects for two-word phrases relative to unstructured word lists in these areas. Our results are most consistent with the hypothesis that increased activity in IFG and pSTS for basic contrasts of structure reflects syntactic prediction. The pars opercularis of the IFG showed a response profile consistent with verbal working memory. We found incremental effects of structure in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), and increased activation only for sentences in the angular gyrus (AG)/temporaleparietal junction (TPJ) e both regions showed these effects for stimuli with all real words. These findings support a role for the ATL in semantic combination and the AG/TPJ in thematic processing.
Coreference and Antecedent Representation Across Languages
When we decide the referent of an anaphoric pronoun, do we reactivate the grammatical properties of its antecedent? Sol Lago and collaborators compare English with German, a language where pronouns may display the noun class of their antecedent.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):Sol Lago (*14), Shayne Sloggett (Baggett Fellow), Zoe Schlueter (*17), Wing Yee Chow (*13)
Dates:
Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their antecedent noun. In contrast, in languages without syntactic gender such as English, lexical retrieval might be unnecessary. We used eye-tracking while reading to examine whether antecedent retrieval involves rapid semantic and phonological reactivation. We compared German and English. In German, we found early sensitivity to the semantic but not to the phonological features of the pronoun’s antecedent. In English, readers did not immediately show either semantic or phonological effects specific to coreference. We propose that early semantic facilitation arises due to syntactic gender reactivation, and that antecedent retrieval varies cross-linguistically depending on the type of information relevant to the grammar of each language.
A unified account of categorical effects in phonetic perception
A statistical model that explains both the strong categorical effects in perception of consonants, and the very weak effects in perception of vowels.
Contributor(s): Naomi FeldmanNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Yakov Kronrod, Emily Coppess
Dates:
Categorical effects are found across speech sound categories, with the degree of these effects ranging from extremely strong categorical perception in consonants to nearly continuous perception in vowels. We show that both strong and weak categorical effects can be captured by a unified model. We treat speech perception as a statistical inference problem, assuming that listeners use their knowledge of categories as well as the acoustics of the signal to infer the intended productions of the speaker. Simulations show that the model provides close fits to empirical data, unifying past findings of categorical effects in consonants and vowels and capturing differences in the degree of categorical effects through a single parameter.
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On how verification tasks are related to verification procedures: A reply to Kotek et al.
How do we mentally represent the meaning of "most"? Here Tim Hunter clarifies the goals of Jeff Lidz and Paul Pietroski's project to answer this question, in respsonse to misunderstandings.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Tim Hunter, Darko Odic, Alexis Wellwood
Dates:
Kotek et al. (Nat Lang Semant 23: 119–156, 2015) argue on the basis of novel experimental evidence that sentences like ‘Most of the dots are blue’ are ambiguous, i.e. have two distinct truth conditions. Kotek et al. furthermore suggest that when their results are taken together with those of earlier work by Lidz et al. (Nat Lang Semant 19: 227–256, 2011), the overall picture that emerges casts doubt on the conclusions that Lidz et al. drew from their earlier results. We disagree with this characterization of the relationship between the two studies. Our main aim in this reply is to clarify the relationship as we see it. In our view, Kotek et al.’s central claims are simply logically independent of those of Lidz et al.: the former concern which truth condition(s) a certain kind of sentence has, while the latter concern the procedures that speakers choose for the purposes of determining whether a particular truth condition is satisfied in various scenes. The appearance of a conflict between the two studies stems from inattention to the distinction between questions about truth conditions and questions about verification procedures.
Infant-directed speech is consistent with teaching
Why do we speak differently to infants than to adults? To help answer this question, Naomi Feldman offers a formal theory of phonetic teaching and learning.
Contributor(s): Naomi FeldmanNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Baxter Eaves Jr., Thomas Griffiths, Patrick Shafto
Dates:
Infant-directed speech (IDS) has distinctive properties that differ from adult-directed speech (ADS). Why it has these properties -- and whether they are intended to facilitate language learning -- is matter of contention. We argue that much of this disagreement stems from lack of a formal, guiding theory of how phonetic categories should best be taught to infant-like learners. In the absence of such a theory, researchers have relied on intuitions about learning to guide the argument. We use a formal theory of teaching, validated through experiments in other domains, as the basis for a detailed analysis of whether IDS is well-designed for teaching phonetic categories. Using the theory, we generate ideal data for teaching phonetic categories in English. We qualitatively compare the simulated teaching data with human IDS, finding that the teaching data exhibit many features of IDS, including some that have been taken as evidence IDS is not for teaching. The simulated data reveal potential pitfalls for experimentalists exploring the role of IDS in language learning. Focusing on different formants and phoneme sets leads to different conclusions, and the benefit of the teaching data to learners is not apparent until a sufficient number of examples have been provided. Finally, we investigate transfer of IDS to learning ADS. The teaching data improves classification of ADS data, but only for the learner they were generated to teach; not universally across all classes of learner. This research offers a theoretically-grounded framework that empowers experimentalists to systematically evaluate whether IDS is for teaching.
A Direct Comparison of N400 Effects of Predictability and Incongruity in Adjective-Noun Combination
The N400 is modulated both by association and by predictability: but independently? Only slightly, show Ellen and her collaborators, suggesting that its senstivity to both does not come just from trouble integrating a word with its prior context.
Contributor(s): Ellen LauNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Anna Namyst, Allison Fogel, Tania Delgado
Dates:
Previous work has shown that the N400 ERP component is elicited by all words, whether presented in isolation or in structured contexts, and that its amplitude is modulated by semantic association and contextual predictability. What is less clear is the extent to which the N400 response is modulated by semantic incongruity when predictability is held constant. In the current study we examine N400 modulation associated with independent manipulations of predictability and congruity in an adjective-noun paradigm that allows us to precisely control predictability through corpus counts. Our results demonstrate small N400 effects of semantic congruity (yellow bag vs. innocent bag), and much more robust N400 effects of predictability (runny nose vs. dainty nose) under the same conditions. These data argue against unitary N400 theories according to which N400 effects of both predictability and incongruity reflect a common process such as degree of integration difficulty, as large N400 effects of predictability were observed in the absence of large N400 effects of incongruity. However, the data are consistent with some versions of unitary ‘facilitated access’ N400 theories, as well as multiple-generator accounts according to which the N400 can be independently modulated by facilitated conceptual/lexical access (as with predictability) and integration diffculty (as with incongruity, perhaps to a greater extent in full sentential contexts).
Negative polarity illusions and the format of hierarchical encodings in memory
"The bill that no senator endorsed will ever become a law." This is ungrammatical, but may initially seem acceptable, a 'grammatical illusion.' Here Dan Parker and Colin Phillips show how this particular type of illusion depends on timing.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Dan Parker
Dates:
Linguistic illusions have provided valuable insights into how we mentally navigate complex representations in memory during language comprehension. Two notable cases involve illusory licensing of agreement and negative polarity items (NPIs), where comprehenders fleetingly accept sentences with unlicensed agreement or an unlicensed NPI, but judge those same sentences as unacceptable after more reflection. Existing accounts have argued that illusions are a consequence of faulty memory access processes, and make the additional assumption that the encoding of the sentence remains fixed over time. This paper challenges the predictions made by these accounts, which assume that illusions should generalize to a broader set of structural environments and a wider range of syntactic and semantic phenomena. We show across seven reading-time and acceptability judgment experiments that NPI illusions can be reliably switched “on” and “off”, depending on the amount of time from when the potential licensor is processed until the NPI is encountered. But we also find that the same profile does not extend to agreement illusions. This contrast suggests that the mechanisms responsible for switching the NPI illusion on and off are not shared across all illusions. We argue that the contrast reflects changes over time in the encoding of the semantic/pragmatic representations that can license NPIs. Just as optical illusions have been informative about the visual system, selective linguistic illusions are informative not only about the nature of the access mechanisms, but also about the nature of the encoding mechanisms.
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