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 role of language processing in language acquisition
How does development in a child's ability to comprehend speech in real time relate to their successes and challenges in acquiring a grammar?
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Lara Ehrenhofer
Dates:
Language processing research is changing in two ways that should make it more relevant to the study of grammatical learning. First, grammatical phenomena are re-entering the psycholinguistic fray, and we have learned a lot in recent yearsabout the real-time deployment of grammatical knowledge. Second, psycholinguistics is reaching more diverse populations, leading to much research on language processing in child and adult learners. We discuss three ways that language processing can be used to understand language acquisition. Level 1 approaches (“Processing in learners”) explore well-known phenomena from
the adult psycholinguistic literature and document how they play out in learner populations (child learners, adult learners, bilinguals). Level 2 approaches (“Learning effects as processing effects”) use insights from adult psycholinguistics
to understand the language proficiency of learners. We argue that a rich body of findings that have been attributed to the grammatical development of anaphora should instead be attributed to limitations in the learner’s language processing system. Level 3 approaches (“Explaining learning via processing”) use language processing to understand what it takes to successfully master the grammar of a language, and why different learner groups are more or less successful. We examine whether language processing may explain why some grammatical phenomena are mastered late in children but not in adult learners. We discuss
the idea that children’s language learning prowess is directly caused by their processing limitations (‘less is more’: Newport, 1990). We conclude that the idea is unlikely to be correct in its original form, but that a variant of the idea has some promise (‘less is eventually more’). We lay out key research questions that need to be addressed in order to resolve the issues addressed in the paper.
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Learning obscure and obvious properties of language
Lara Ehrenhofer and Colin Phillips respond to commentary on their discussion of how development in the capacity to parse speech online relates to grammar acquisition in young children.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Lara Ehrenhofer
Dates:
Lara Ehrenhofer and Colin Phillips respond to commentary on their discussion of how development in the capacity to parse speech online relates to grammar acquisition in young children.
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Processing implicit control: Evidence from reading times
A series of reading time studies directed at the representation of "implicit control" in sentences like "The ship was sunk to collect the insurance," when the understood sinker is the intended collector.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Michael McCourt, Jeffrey Green
Dates:
Sentences such as “The ship was sunk to collect the insurance” exhibit an unusual form of anaphora, implicit control, where neither anaphor nor antecedent is audible. The non-finite reason clause has an understood subject, PRO, that is anaphoric; here it may be understood as naming the agent of the event of the host clause. Yet since the host is a short passive, this agent is realized by no audible dependent. The putative antecedent to PRO is therefore implicit, which it normally cannot be. What sorts of representations subserve the comprehension of this dependency? Here we present four self-paced reading time studies directed at this question. Previous work showed no processing cost for implicit vs. explicit control, and took this to support the view that PRO is linked syntactically to a silent argument in the passive. We challenge this conclusion by reporting that we also find no processing cost for remote implicit control, as in: “The ship was sunk. The reason was to collect the insurance.” Here the dependency crosses two independent sentences, and so cannot, we argue, be mediated by syntax. Our Experiments 1–4 examined the processing of both implicit (short passive) and explicit (active or long passive) control in both local and remote configurations. Experiments 3 and 4 added either “3 days ago” or “just in order” to the local conditions, to control for the distance between the passive and infinitival verbs, and for the predictability of the reason clause, respectively. We replicate the finding that implicit control does not imposean additional processing cost . But critically we show that remote control does not impose a processing cost either. Reading times at the reason clause were never slower when control was remote. In fact they were always faster. Thus, efficient processing of local implicit control cannot show that implicit control is mediated by syntax; nor, in turn, that there is a silent but grammatically active argument in passives.
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The differential representation of number and gender in Spanish
Number are gender features are syntactically separate, argues visiting PhD student Zuzanna Fuchs, with mentor Maria Polinsky.
Contributor(s): Maria PolinskyNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Zuzanna Fuchs, Gregory Scontras
Dates:
This paper investigates the geometry of phi-features, with a special emphasis on number and gender in Spanish. We address two sets of questions: (i) are number and gender bundled together or do they constitute separate categories, and (ii) does the internal feature composition of number and gender follow a single- or a multi-valued system? Given the lack of consensus on these issues based on primary data, we approach these questions experimentally, using the phenomenon of agreement attraction: a situation in which ungrammatical sequences are perceived as grammatical when one of the NPs is erroneously identified as determining agreement. Our results offer novel support in favor of an agreement model in which number and gender are in separate projections and are valued independently. In addition, our results indicate that number but not gender in Spanish is multi-valued.
Heritage language and linguistic theory
Case studies on heritage linguistics, documenting some of the deficits and abilities typical of heritage speakers, together with the broader theoretical questions they inform.
Contributor(s): Maria PolinskyNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Gregory Scontras, Zuzanna Fuchs
Dates:
This paper discusses a common reality in many cases of multilingualism: heritage speakers, or unbalanced bilinguals, simultaneous or sequential, who shifted early in childhood from one language (their heritage language) to their dominant language (the language of their speech community). To demonstrate the relevance of heritage linguistics to the study of linguistic competence more broadly defined, we present a series of case studies on heritage linguistics, documenting some of the deficits and abilities typical of heritage speakers, together with the broader theoretical questions they inform. We consider the reorganization of morphosyntactic feature systems, the reanalysis of atypical argument structure, the attrition of the syntax of relativization, and the simplification of scope interpretations; these phenomena implicate diverging trajectories and outcomes in the development of heritage speakers. The case studies also have practical and methodological implications for the study of multilingualism. We conclude by discussing more general concepts central to linguistic inquiry, in particular, complexity and native speaker competence.
A 'bag-of-arguments' mechanism for initial verb predictions
Wing Yee Chow and collaborators propose that predictions of an upcoming verb based on a preceding argument NP are based initially on the meaning of its head noun,and only later on the meaning of its grammatical relation.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Wing-Yee Chow, Cybelle Smith
Dates:
Previous studies have shown that comprehenders use rich contextual information to anticipate upcoming input on the fly, but less is known about how comprehenders integrate different sources of information to generate predictions in real time. The current study examines the time course with which the lexical meaning and structural roles of preverbal arguments impact comprehenders’ lexical semantic predictions about an upcoming verb in two event-related potential (ERP) experiments that use the N400 amplitude as a measure of online predictability. Experiment 1 showed that the N400 was sensitive to predictability when the verb’s cloze probability was reduced by substituting one of the arguments (e.g. “The superintendent overheard which tenant/realtor the landlord had evicted ... ”), but not when the verb’s cloze probability was reduced by simply swapping the roles of the arguments (e.g. “The restaurant owner forgot which customer/waitress the waitress/customer had served...”). Experiment 2 showed that argument substitution elicited an N400 effect even when the substituted argument appeared elsewhere in the sentence, indicating that verb predictions are specifically driven by the arguments in the same clause as the verb, rather than by a simple “bag-of-words” mechanism. We propose that verb predictions initially rely on a “bag-of-arguments” mechanism, which specifically relies on the lexical meaning, but not the structural roles, of the arguments in a clause.

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Interference in the processing of adjunct control
"*The discovery that the researcher described was certified after debunking the myth himself." This is unacceptable, but in online comprehension the presence of "researcher" may make it seem better than it is. Dan Parker investigates the effect.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Daniel Parker, Sol Lago
Dates:
Recent research on the memory operations used in language comprehension has revealed a selective profile of interference effects during memory retrieval. Dependencies such as subject–verb agreement show strong facilitatory interference effects from structurally inappropriate but feature-matching distractors, leading to illusions of grammaticality (Pearlmutter et al., 1999; Wagers et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013). In contrast, dependencies involving reflexive anaphors are generally immune to interference effects (Sturt, 2003; Xiang et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013). This contrast has led to the proposal that all anaphors that are subject to structural constraints are immune to facilitatory interference. Here we use an animacy manipulation to examine whether adjunct control dependencies, which involve an interpreted anaphoric relation between a null subject and its licensor, are also immune to facilitatory interference effects. Our results show reliable facilitatory interference in the processing of adjunct control dependencies, which challenges the generalization that anaphoric dependencies as a class are immune to such effects. To account for the contrast between adjunct control and reflexive dependencies, we suggest that variability within anaphora could reflect either an inherent primacy of animacy cues in retrieval processes, or differential degrees of match between potential licensors and the retrieval probe.
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Comparative psychosyntax
A dissertation from Dustin Chacón on the learning and online formation of filler-gap dependencies and their syntactic constraints, with special attention to English, Japanese and Bangla.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Dustin Chacón
Dates:
Every difference between languages is a “choice point” for the syntactician, psycholinguist, and language learner. The syntactician must describe the differences in representations that the grammars of different languages can assign. The psycholinguist must describe how the comprehension mechanisms search the space of the representations permitted by a grammar to quickly and effortlessly understand sentences in real time. The language learner must determine which representations are permitted in her grammar on the basis of her primary linguistic evidence. These investigations are largely pursued independently, and on the basis of qualitatively different data. In this dissertation, I show that these investigations can be pursued in a way that is mutually informative. Speciffically, I show how learnability concerns and sentence processing data can constrain the space of possible analyses of language differences.
In Chapter 2, I argue that “indirect learning”, or abstract, cross-contruction syntactic inference, is necessary in order to explain how the learner determines which complementizers can co-occur with subjects gaps in her target grammar. I show that adult speakers largely converge in the robustness of the that-trace effect, a constraint on complementation complementizers and subject gaps observed in languages like English, but unobserved in languages like Spanish or Italian. I show that realistic child-directed speech has very few long-distance subject extractions in English, Spanish, and Italian, implying that learners must be able to distinguish these different hypotheses on the basis of other data. This is more consistent with more conservative approaches to these phenomena (Rizzi, 1982), which do not rely on abstract complementizer agreement like later analyses (Rizzi, 2006; Rizzi & Shlonsky, 2007).
In Chapter 3, I show that resumptive pronoun dependencies inside islands in English are constructed in a non-active fashion, which contrasts with recent findings in Hebrew (Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher, ms). I propose that an expedient explanation of these facts is to suppose that resumptive pronouns in English are ungrammatical repair devices (Sells, 1984), whereas resumptive pronouns in island contexts are grammatical in Hebrew. This implies that learners must infer which analysis is appropriate for their grammars on the basis of some evidence in linguistic environment. However, a corpus study reveals that resumptive pronouns in islands are exceedingly rare in both languages, implying that this difference must be indirectly learned. I argue that theories of resumptive dependencies which analyze resumptive pronouns as incidences of the same abstract construction (e.g., Hayon 1973; Chomsky 1977) license this indirect learning, as long as resumptive dependencies in English are treated as ungrammatical repair mechanisms.
In Chapter 4, I compare active dependency formation processes in Japanese and Bangla. These findings suggest that filler-gap dependencies are preferentially resolved with the first position available. In Japanese, this is the most deeply embedded clause, since embedded clauses always precede the embedding verb (Aoshima et al., 2004; Yoshida, 2006; Omaki et al., 2014). Bangla allows a within-language comparison of the relationship between active dependency formation processes and word order, since embedded clauses may precede or follow the embedding verb (Bayer, 1996). However, the results from three experiments in Bangla are mixed, suggesting a weaker preference for a lineary local resolution of filler-gap dependencies, unlike in Japanese. I propose a number of possible explanations for these facts, and discuss how differences in processing profiles may be accounted for in a variety of ways.
In Chapter 5, I conclude the dissertation.
Syntactic bootstrapping in the acquisition of attitude verbs
A dissertation from Kate Harrigan, on syntactic bootrapping in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as "think" and "want."
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Kaitlyn Harrigan
Dates:
Attitude verbs (e.g., think, want, hope) report mental states. Learning the meanings of attitude verbs may be difficult for language learners for several reasons; including the abstractness of the concepts that they refer to, and the linguistic properties. In this dissertation, we investigate the learning process for these words, by looking at an asymmetry that has been observed in the acquisition trajectory: want, which refers to desires, has been claimed to be acquired before think, which refers to beliefs. We explore this asymmetry in attitude verb acquisition in two ways: by comparing interpretation of think and want, controlling for several methodological differences in the way they have previously been tested; and by investigating children’s sensitivity to syntactic distribution in interpreting and learning attitude verbs.
We start with an observation that previous tasks comparing interpretation of think and want often tested these verbs under different experimental conditions. Tests of think required processing additional demands; including a conflict with reality, and a conflict with the child’s own mental state. In experiments 1-3, we test interpretation of want adding these additional task demands; and find that children are still adult-like in interpreting want sooner than they have reliably shown to be adult-like in interpreting think. In Experiment 4, we directly compare think and want in the same experimental context. We still find adult-like behavior with want and not think. These studies demonstrate that the observed asymmetry between think and want reflects a real acquisition asymmetry, and is not due to experimental artifacts.
After establishing in experiments 1-4 that the asymmetry between think and want reflects real acquisition facts, we explore children’s learning mechanism for attitude verbs in experiments 5 and 6. We test children’s sensitivity to syntactic distribution in hypothesizing an unknown attitude verb’s syntax. In experiment 5, we find that children use syntactic complement to interpret sentences with a potentially unknown attitude verb. In experiment 6, we show that they integrate syntactic information into their semantic representation for this new verb; and continue to hypothesize a meaning based on syntactic frame in future experiences with the same verb.
Verb learning under guidance
How do kids leverage correlations between syntactic and semantic categories to infer the meanings of words?
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Angela Xiaoxue He
Dates:
Any kind of uninstructed learning, faced by the challenge that any finite experience is consistent with infinitely many hypotheses, must proceed under guidance. This dissertation investigates guided vocabulary acquisition with a focus on verb learning. In particular, it examines some proposed early expectations that the young language learner may hold as guidance in learning novel verbs, and investigates the nature of these expectations from different angles. Four lines of studies are reported, each discussing a different question. Study 1 focuses on the expectation that the grammatical category verb picks out the conceptual category event – the verb-event bias, and examines the early developmental trajectory of this bias, which may shed light on its origin: whether it is specified within UG or generalized inductively from input. Study 2 further asks how specific/general the learner’s initial expectations about verb meanings are, and thus what is the expected degree of extendibility of verb meanings. Study 3 investigates the proposed expectation that the number of event participants aligns with the number of syntactic arguments – the participant-argument-match (PAM) bias, and questions the utility of this bias in face of potential mismatch cases; in particular, some plausible 3-participant events are naturally described by2-argument sentences. Study 4 looks at the proposed expectation that objects name patients (ONP) and asks a question about its exact nature in face of cross- linguistic variation – whether objects are expected to name patients of the clause’s event, or to name patients of the verb’s event, and whether it varies cross-linguistically. Together, this dissertation provides new evidence that the language learner acquires verb meanings under guidance, asks new questions about the natures of some verb-learning guides, and highlights several issues the current acquisition theory needs to address.