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
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
An esssential compendium of contemporary research in language acquisition.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): William Snyder, Joe Pater
Dates:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publisher: Oxford University Press
1. Introduction, Jeffrey Lidz, William Snyder, and Joe Pater#### Part I: The Acquisition of Sound Systems
2. The Acquisition of Phonological Inventories, Ewan Dunbar and William Idsardi
3. Phonotactics and Syllable Structure in Infant Speech Perception, Tania S. Zamuner and Viktor Kharlamov
4. Phonological Processes in Children's Production: Convergence with and Divergence from Adult Grammars, Heather Goad
5. Prosodic Phenomena: Stress, Tone, and Intonation, Mitsuhiko Ota
####Part II: The Acquisition of Morphology
6. Compound Word Formation, William Snyder
7. Morpho-phonological Acquisition, Anne-Michelle Tessier
8. Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy: From Major Prosodic Units to Isolated Word Forms, Louise Goyet, Severine Millotte, Anne Christophe, and Thierry Nazzi
####Part III: The Acquisition of Syntax
9. Argument Structure, Joshua Viau and Ann Bunger
10. Voice Alternations (Active, Passive, Middle), M. Teresa Guasti
11. On the Acquisition of Prepositions and Particles, Koji Sugisaki
12. A-Movement in Language Development, Misha Becker and Susannah Kirby
13. The Acquisition of Complements, Jill de Villiers and Tom Roeper
14. Acquisition of Questions, Rosalind Thornton
15. Root Infinitives in Child Language and the Structure of the Clause, John Grinstead
16. Mood Alternations, Kamil Ud Deen
17. Null Subjects, Virginia Valian
18. Case and Agreement, Paul Hagstrom
19. Acquiring Possessives, Theo Marinis
####Part IV: The Acquisition of Semantics
20. Acquisition of Comparative and Degree Constructions, Kristen Syrett
21. Quantification in Child Language, Jeffrey Lidz
22. The Acquisition of Binding and Coreference, Sergio Baauw
23. Logical Connectives, Takuya Goro
24. The Expression of Genericity in Child Language, Ana T. Perez-Laroux
25. Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, Angeliek van Hout
26. Scalar Implicature, Anna Papafragou and Dimitrios Skordos
####Part V: Theories of Learning
27. Computational Theories of Learning and Developmental Psycholinguistics, Jeffrey Heinz
28. Statistical Learning, Inductive Bias, and Bayesian Inference in Language Acquisition, Lisa Pearl and Sharon Goldwater
29. Computational Approaches to Parameter Setting in Generative Linguistics, William Gregory Sakas
30. Learning with Violable Constraints, Gaja Jarosz
####Part VI: Atypical Populations
31. Language Development in Children with Developmental Disorders, Andrea Zukowski
32. The Genetics of Spoken Language, Jennifer Ganger
33. Phonological Disorders: Theoretical and Experimental Findings, Daniel A. Dinnsen, Jessica A. Barlow, and Judith A. Gierut
Direction matters: Event-related brain potentials reflect extra processing costs in switching from the dominant to the less dominant language
An ERP study of language-switching in Mandarin-Taiwanese bilinguals. Are the costs of switching modulated by the direction of switch? And by the semantic predictability of the word at the switch?
Author/Lead: Chia-Hsuan LiaoNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Shiao-Hui Chan
Dates:
Language switching is common in bilingual processing, and it has been repeatedly shown to induce processing costs. However, only a handful of studies have examined such costs at the sentence level, with a limited few among them having incorporated factors extensively studied in monolingual sentence processing, such as semantic expectedness. Using the event related potentials (ERP) technique, this study aimed at exploring whether switching costs were modulated by (1) switching directions, when switching happens between languages of different dominance, and by (2) semantic expectedness, as indicated by cloze probability. Twenty-two Mandarin-Taiwanese early bilinguals, with Mandarin being their dominant and Taiwanese their non-dominant language, participated in the study. They were instructed to listen to the stimuli attentively and to perform a word memory recognition task in 20% of the trials. The results showed that switching induced an LPC effect, suggesting that switched elements were harder to be integrated. More importantly, switching from the dominant to the non-dominant language demanded extra effort than switching in the other direction, as reflected by the PMN (detection of an unexpected sound), the N400 (indication of lexical access difficulty) and the frontal negativity (inhibition of the pre-activated representations), revealing that the dominant language provides better prediction of the upcoming word. Also, cloze probability interacted with switching, but only at an early stage, suggesting that semantic expectedness did not enduringly modulate the switching cost. Our results generally supported predictions from the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus model (BIA+ model, Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002), showing that language use and sentence context can affect lexical processing in bilinguals.
On experiencers and minimality
On psych-verbs and experiencers in Brazilian Portugese.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Carolina Petersen
Dates:
This dissertation is concerned with experiencer arguments, and what they tell us about the grammar. There are two main types of experiencers I discuss: experiencers of psychological verbs and experiencers of raising constructions. I question the notion of ‘experiencers’ itself; and explore some possible accounts for the ‘psych-effects’. I argue that the ‘experiencer theta role’ is conceptually unnecessary and unsustained by syntactic evidence. ‘Experiencers’ can be reduced to different types of arguments. Taking Brazilian Portuguese as my main case study, I claim that languages may grammaticalize psychological predicates and their arguments in different ways. These verb classes exist in languages independently, and the psych-verbs behavior can be explained by the argument structure of the verbal class they belong to. I further discuss experiencers in raising structures, and the defective intervention effects triggered by different types of experiencers (e.g., DPs, PPs, clitics, traces) in a variety of languages. I show that defective intervention is mostly predictable across languages, and there’s not much variation regarding its effects. Moreover, I argue that defective intervention can be captured by a notion of minimality that requires interveners to be syntactic objects and not syntactic occurrences (a chain, and not a copy/trace). The main observation is that once a chain is no longer in the c-command domain of a probe, defective intervention is obviated, i.e., it doesn’t apply. I propose a revised version of the Minimal Link Condition (1995), in which only syntactic objects may intervene in syntactic relations, and not copies. This view of minimality can explain the core cases of defective intervention crosslinguistically.
Locality and Word Order in Active Dependency Formation in Bangla
In real-time comprehension, people are eager to relate question words like "what" to the nearest possible predicate. But is it strurctural or linear nearness that matters? The two possibilities can be distinguished in Bangla.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Dustin A. Chacón, Mashrur Imtiaz, Shirsho Dasgupta, Sikder M. Murshed, Mina Dan
Dates:
Research on filler-gap dependencies has revealed that there are constraints on possible gap sites, and that real-time sentence processing is sensitive to these constraints. This work has shown that comprehenders have preferences for potential gap sites, and immediately detect when these preferences are not met. However, neither the mechanisms that select preferred gap sites nor the mechanisms used to detect whether these preferences are met are well-understood. In this paper, we report on three experiments in Bangla, a language in which gaps may occur in either a pre-verbal embedded clause or a post-verbal embedded clause. This word order variation allows us to manipulate whether the first gap linearly available is contained in the same clause as the filler, which allows us to dissociate structural locality from linear locality. In Experiment 1, an untimed ambiguity resolution task, we found a global bias to resolve a filler-gap dependency with the first gap linearly available, regardless of structural hierarchy. In Experiments 2 and 3, which use the filled-gap paradigm, we found sensitivity to disruption only when the blocked gap site is both structurally and linearly local, i.e., the filler and the gap site are contained in the same clause. This suggests that comprehenders may not show sensitivity to the disruption of all preferred gap resolutions.
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Parsing, generation and grammar
Shota Momma on sentence planning and production, arguing that the same processes of structure-building are used here as in comprehension
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Shota Momma
Dates:
Humans use their grammatical knowledge in more than one way. On one hand, they use it to understand what others say. On the other hand, they use it to say what they want to convey to others (or to themselves). In either case, they need to assemble the structure of sentences in a systematic fashion, in accordance with the grammar of their language. Despite the fact that the structures that comprehenders and speakers assemble are systematic in an identical fashion (i.e., obey the same grammatical constraints), the two ‘modes’ of assembling sentence structures might or might not be performed by the same cognitive mechanisms. Currently, the field of psycholinguistics implicitly adopts the position that they are supported by different cognitive mechanisms, as evident from the fact that most psycholinguistic models seek to explain either comprehension or production phenomena. The potential existence of two independent cognitive systems underlying linguistic performance doubles the problem of linking the theory of linguistic knowledge and the theory of linguistic performance, making the integration of linguistics and psycholinguistic harder. This thesis thus aims to unify the structure building system in comprehension, i.e., parser, and the structure building system in production, i.e., generator, into one, so that the linking theory between knowledge and performance can also be unified into one. I will discuss and unify both existing and new data pertaining to how structures are assembled in understanding and speaking, and attempt to show that the unification between parsing and generation is at least a plausible research enterprise. In Chapter 1, I will discuss the previous and current views on how parsing and generation are related to each other. I will outline the challenges for the current view that the parser and the generator are the same cognitive mechanism. This single system view is discussed and evaluated in the rest of the chapters. In Chapter 2, I will present new experimental evidence suggesting that the grain size of the pre-compiled structural units (henceforth simply structural units) is rather small, contrary to some models of sentence production. In particular, I will show that the internal structure of the verb phrase in a ditransitive sentence (e.g., The chef is donating the book to the monk) is not specified at the onset of speech, but is specified before the first internal argument (the book) needs to be uttered. I will also show that this timing of structural processes with respect to the verb phrase structure is earlier than the lexical processes of verb internal arguments. These two results in concert show that the size of structure building units in sentence production is rather small, contrary to some models of sentence production, yet structural processes still precede lexical processes. I argue that this view of generation resembles the widely accepted model of parsing that utilizes both top-down and bottom-up structure building procedures. In Chapter 3, I will present new experimental evidence suggesting that the structural representation strongly constrains the subsequent lexical processes. In particular, I will show that conceptually similar lexical items interfere with each other only when they share the same syntactic category in sentence production. The mechanism that I call syntactic gating, will be proposed, and this mechanism characterizes how the structural and lexical processes interact in generation. I will present two Event Related Potential (ERP) experiments that show that the lexical retrieval in (predictive) comprehension is also constrained by syntactic categories. I will argue that the syntactic gating mechanism is operative both in parsing and generation, and that the interaction between structural and lexical processes in both parsing and generation can be characterized in the same fashion. In Chapter 4, I will present a series of experiments examining the timing at which verbs’ lexical representations are planned in sentence production. It will be shown that verbs are planned before the articulation of their internal arguments, regardless of the target language (Japanese or English) and regardless of the sentence type (active object-initial sentence in Japanese, passive sentences in English, and unaccusative sentences in English). I will discuss how this result sheds light on the notion of incrementality in generation. In Chapter 5, I will synthesize the experimental findings presented in this thesis and in previous research to address the challenges to the single system view I outlined in Chapter 1. I will then conclude by presenting a preliminary single system model that can potentially capture both the key sentence comprehension and sentence production data without assuming distinct mechanisms for each.
Looking ahead
A prospectus of what lies ahead for the studies of Spanish as a heritage language in the U.S., and of understanding heritage language as a general phenomenon.
Contributor(s): Maria Polinsky
Dates:
Publisher: John Benjamins
Publisher: John Benjamins
A prospectus of what lies ahead for the studies of Spanish as a heritage language in the U.S., and of understanding heritage language as a general phenomenon.
The acquisition of adjunct control: Grammar and processing
A dissertation on development in the grammar and online comprehension of adjunct control in children.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Juliana Gerard
Dates:
This dissertation uses children’s acquisition of adjunct control as a case study to investigate grammatical and performance accounts of language acquisition. In previous research, children have consistently exhibited non-adultlike behavior for sentences with adjunct control. To explain children’s behavior, several different grammatical accounts have been proposed, but evidence for these accounts has been inconclusive. In this dissertation, I take two approaches to account for children’s errors.
First, I spell out the predictions of previous grammatical accounts, and test these predictions after accounting for some methodological concerns that might have influenced children’s behavior in previous studies. While I reproduce the non-adultlike behavior observed in previous studies, the predictions of previous grammatical accounts are not borne out, suggesting that extragrammatical factors are needed to explain children’s behavior.
Next, I consider the role of two different types of extragrammatical factors in predicting children’s non-adultlike behavior. With a new task designed to address the task demands in previous studies, children exhibit significantly higher accuracy than with previous tasks. This suggests that children’s behavior has been influenced by task- specific processing factors. In addition to the task, I also test the predictions of a similarity-based interference account, which links children’s errors to the same memory mechanisms involved in sentence processing difficulties observed in adults. These predictions are borne out, supporting a more continuous developmental trajectory as children’s processing mechanisms become more resistant to interference.
Finally, I consider how children’s errors might influence their acquisition of adjunct control, given the distribution in the linguistic input. I discuss the results of a corpus analysis, including the possibility that adjunct control could be learned from the input. The kinds of information that could be useful to a learner become much more limited, however, after considering the processing limitations that would interfere with the representations available to the learner.
Bilingual children and adult heritage speakers: The range of comparison
There are many kinds of bilinguals. This paper compares and contrasts three: child bilinguals, adult heritage speakers, and adult bilinguals who speak their home language natively.
Contributor(s): Maria Polinsky
Dates:
This paper compares the language of child bilinguals and adult unbalanced bilinguals (heritage speakers) against that of bilingual native speakers of their home language (baseline). We identify four major vectors of correspondence across the language spoken by these three groups. First, all varieties may represent a given linguistic property in a similar way (child bilinguals = adult heritage speakers = bilingual native speakers of their home language). This occurs when either (i) the property in question is highly robust and is acquired by learners without difficulty or (ii) the property is already in decline in the baseline. We illustrate scenario (i) with data from Russian count forms, which are morphologically quite complex. The preservation of these forms in child bilinguals and adult heritage speakers suggests that simplicity of encoding is not the only factor determining robustness of retention. Second, child and heritage speakers may share a linguistic structure that differs from the one found in the baseline (bilingual native speakers of their home language ≠ child bilinguals = adult heritage speakers). This scenario occurs when incipient structural changes in the baseline become amplified in the language of next-generation bilinguals, or when a given structure is rare, confined to a specific register, and/or reinforced through literacy. Third, a structure may be acquired by bilingual children faithfully, but undergo reanalysis/attrition in the adult heritage language (bilingual native speakers of their home language = child bilinguals ≠ adult heritage speakers). Russian relativization illustrates this scenario; child bilinguals show native-like performance on relative clauses but adult heritage speakers show an exaggerated subject preference in the interpretation of gaps. Finally, a structure that is not fully learned by child speakers may be reanalyzed by adult heritage speakers following general principles, thus bringing the adult heritage representation closer to that of the baseline (bilingual native speakers of their home language = adult heritage speakers ≠ child bilinguals). Heritage speakers’ production and comprehension of psychological predicates in Spanish illustrates this possibility.
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Structure vs. use in heritage language
The grammars of native and heritage speakers may differ fundamentally in their representation of certain grammatical categories.
Contributor(s): Maria Polinsky
Dates:
This paper provides an overview of the phenomenon of heritage language and offers evidence in support of representational differences between (baseline) native grammars and heritage grammars, arguing that such differences that cannot be reduced entirely to the effects of processing constraints or memory limitations. Data from heritage Spanish number/gender agreement and from Russian ellipsis indicate that baseline native grammars and heritage grammars may have a fundamentally different organization of certain categories.
Establishing new mappings between familiar phones: Neural and behavioral evidence for early automatic processing of nonnative contrasts
Behavioral and neural evidence for sound-categorization in a second language.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Shannon Barrios, Anna Namyst
Dates:
To attain native-like competence, second language (L2) learners must establish mappings between familiar speech sounds and new phoneme categories. For example, Spanish learners of English must learn that [d] and [ð], which are allophones of the same phoneme in Spanish, can distinguish meaning in English (i.e., /deɪ/ "day" and /ðeɪ/ "they"). Because adult listeners are less sensitive to allophonic than phonemic contrasts in their native language (L1), novel target language contrasts between L1 allophones may pose special difficulty for L2 learners. We investigate whether advanced Spanish late-learners of English overcome native language mappings to establish new phonological relations between familiar phones. We report behavioral and magnetoencepholographic (MEG) evidence from two experiments that measured the sensitivity and pre-attentive processing of three listener groups (L1 English, L1 Spanish, and advanced Spanish late-learners of English) to differences between three nonword stimulus pairs ([idi]-[iði], [idi]-[iɾi], and [iði]-[iɾi]) which differ in phones that play a different functional role in Spanish and English. Spanish and English listeners demonstrated greater sensitivity (larger d' scores) for nonword pairs distinguished by phonemic than by allophonic contrasts, mirroring previous findings. Spanish late-learners demonstrated sensitivity (large d' scores and MMN responses) to all three contrasts, suggesting that these L2 learners may have established a novel [d]-[ð] contrast despite the phonological relatedness of these sounds in the L1. Our results suggest that phonological relatedness influences perceived similarity, as evidenced by the results of the native speaker groups, but may not cause persistent difficulty for advanced L2 learners. Instead, L2 learners are able to use cues that are present in their input to establish new mappings between familiar phones.