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
Competence and Performance in the Development of Principle C
"She likes Susan" cannot normally be used to say that Susan likes herself, a fact known as Principle C. Megan Sutton demonstrates knowledge of this in kids as young as two-and-a-half.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Megan Sutton
Dates:
In order to understand the nature of a given linguistic phenomena in the adult grammar, language acquisition research explores how children’s competence with respect to such a phenomena develops. However, diagnosing competence can be challenging because it is not directly observable. Researchers only have access to performance, which is mediated by additional factors and is not a direct reflection of competence. In this dissertation, I explore a case study of children’s early syntactic knowledge. My in-depth analysis of Principle C at 30 months provides novel insights into diagnostics for underlying competence by utilizing two distinct methods of analysis. The first analysis explores alternative mechanisms that have been proposed to account for early Principle C effects. By comparing across multiple linguistic contexts, I show that Principle C knowledge is the only mechanism which can account for all observed performance. The second analysis explores the deployment processes that are required to implement competence in performance. I present a novel analytic approach to identifying underlying knowledge which utilizes independent measures of these deployment processes. I show that individual differences in syntactic processing predict individual differences in interpretation, implicating syntactic processing in Principle C performance at 30 months. Together, these findings extend our knowledge of the developmental pattern that characterizes Principle C, which can contribute to debates about the origin of this constraint as part of the grammar. This research provides new depth to investigations of children’s early syntactic knowledge by highlighting new methods for diagnosing competence from observed performance.
Case in Sakha: Are two modalities really necessary?
Ted and Omer rebut the view that case morphology in Sakha expones two kinds of syntactic dependency: both a relation between two DPs, and a relation between one DP and a functional head. They argue that the former is enough.
Contributor(s): Omer PremingerNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Theodore Levin
Dates:
Baker and Vinokurova (2010) argue that the distribution of morphologically observable case in Sakha (Turkic) requires a hybrid account, which involves recourse both to configurational rules of case assignment (Bittner and Hale 1996; Marantz 1991; Yip et al. 1987), and to case assignment by functional heads (Chomsky 2000, 2001). In this paper, we argue that this conclusion is under-motivated, and present an alternative account of case in Sakha that is entirely configurational. The central innovation lies in abandoning Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) assumptions regarding the interaction of case and agreement, and replacing them with Bobaljik’s (2008) and Preminger’s (2011) independently motivated alternative, nullifying the need to appeal to case assignment by functional heads in accounting for the Sakha facts.
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Bootstrapping attitudes
How can children acquiring a first language distinguish semantic from pragmatic contributions to what a speaker means?
Contributor(s): Valentine Hacquard
Dates:
This paper explores two classic problems at the semantics-pragmatics interface from a learner’s perspective. First, the meaning that speakers convey often goes beyond the literal meaning of the sentences they utter. Second, not all content encoded in utterances has equal standing: some is foregrounded, some backgrounded. Yet a sentence does not formally distinguish what a speaker asserts from what she presupposes or merely implicates. For this reason, the child acquiring a language has a daunting task. She must both extract the literalmeaning from the overall message, and separate the background assumptions that are linguistically required from those that are incidental. This paper discusses the ways in which the syntax might guide the child with this daunting task, through a few case studies on children’s acquisition of attitude verbs.
Agents in Mandarin and Igbo resultatives
The semantics of subjecthood in resultative constructions, comparing Igbo to English and Mandarin.
Contributor(s): Alexander Williams
Dates:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publisher: Oxford University Press
A resultative complex predicate may include an agentive verb, as "cut open" includes "cut". I ask how best to describe variation between Mandarin, Igbo and English in two features of such resultatives. First, while they can generally occur in unaccusative clauses in Mandarin, with the implied agent unexpressed, this is never possible in English, and in Igbo it depends on the verb. Second, when they inhabit a transitive clause the subject must name the agent of the verb's event in Igbo and English, but not Mandarin. Initially this suggests that agentive verbs have their agents as lexical arguments, sometimes in Igbo and always in English. But this leads to unattractive complications. I discuss an alternative, of taking the meaning of the construction to be somewhat narrower in Igbo and English than Mandarin.
Memory and Prediction in Cross-Linguistic Sentence Processing
A dissertation from Sol Lago, on the retrieval of memory for syntactic features of prior noun phrases in the processing of anaphora and agreement.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Sol Lago
Dates:
This dissertation explores the role of morphological and syntactic variation in sentence comprehension across languages. While most previous research has focused on how cross-linguistic differences affect the control structure of the language architecture (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) here we adopt an explicit model of memory, content-addressable memory (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, 2006) and examine how cross-linguistic variation affects the nature of the representations and processes that speakers deploy during comprehension. With this goal, we focus on two kinds of grammatical dependencies that involve an interaction between language and memory: subject-verb agreement and referential pronouns. In the first part of this dissertation, we use the self-paced reading method to examine how the processing of subject-verb agreement in Spanish, a language with a rich morphological system, differs from English. We show that differences in morphological richness across languages impact prediction processes while leaving retrieval processes fairly preserved. In the second part, we examine the processing of coreference in German, a language that, in contrast with English, encodes gender syntactically. We use eye-tracking to compare comprehension profiles during coreference and we find that only speakers of German show evidence of semantic reactivation of a pronoun’s antecedent. This suggests that retrieval of semantic information is dependent on syntactic gender, and demonstrates that German and English speakers retrieve qualitatively different antecedent representations from memory. Taken together, these results suggest that cross-linguistic variation in comprehension is more affected by the content than the functional importance of gender and number features across languages.
Expanding our Reach and Theirs: When Linguists go to High School
A report on outreach to local schools by the community of language scientists at UMCP.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Yakov Kronrod
Dates:
In 2007, we began an outreach program in Linguistics with psychology students in a local majority–minority high school. In the years since, the initial collaboration has grown to include other schools and nurtured a culture of community engagement in the language sciences at the University of Maryland. The program has led to a number of benefits for both the public school students and the University researchers involved. Over the years, our efforts have developed into a multi-faceted outreach program targeting primary and secondary school as well as the public more broadly. Through our outreach, we attempt to take a modest step toward increasing public awareness and appreciation of the importance of language science, toward the integration of research into the school curriculum, and giving potential first-generation college students a taste of what they are capable of. In this article, we describe in detail our motivations and goals, the details of the activities, and where we can go from here.
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Spatiotemporal signatures of lexical-semantic prediction
Ellen Lau finds evidence that facilitatory effects of lexical–semantic prediction on the electrophysiological response 350–450 ms postonset reflect modulation of activity in left anterior temporal cortex.
Contributor(s): Ellen LauNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Kirsten Weber, Alexandre Gramfort, Matti Hamalainen, Gina Kuperberg
Dates:
Although there is broad agreement that top-down expectations can facilitate lexical–semantic processing, the mechanisms driving these effects are still unclear. In particular, while previous electroencephalography (EEG) research has demonstrated a reduction in the N400 response to words in a supportive context, it is often challenging to dissociate facilitation due to bottom-up spreading activation from facilitation due to top-down expectations. The goal of the current study was to specifically determine the cortical areas associated with facilitation due to top-down prediction, using magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings supplemented by EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a semantic priming paradigm. In order to modulate expectation processes while holding context constant, we manipulated the proportion of related pairs across 2 blocks (10 and 50% related). Event-related potential results demonstrated a larger N400 reduction when a related word was predicted, and MEG source localization of activity in this time-window (350–450 ms) localized the differential responses to left anterior temporal cortex. fMRI data from the same participants support the MEG localization, showing contextual facilitation in left anterior superior temporal gyrus for the high expectation block only. Together, these results provide strong evidence that facilitatory effects of lexical–semantic prediction on the electrophysiological response 350–450 ms postonset reflect modulation of activity in left anterior temporal cortex.
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How Nature Meets Nurture: Universal Grammar and Statistical Learning
Children acquire grammars on the basis of statistical information, interpreted through a system of linguistic representation that is substantially innate. Jeff Lidz and Annie Gagliardi propose a model of the process.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Annie Gagliardi
Dates:
Evidence of children’s sensitivity to statistical features of their input in language acquisition is often used to argue against learning mechanisms driven by innate knowledge. At the same time, evidence of children acquiring knowledge that is richer than the input supports arguments in favor of such mechanisms. This tension can be resolved by separating the inferential and deductive components of the language learning mechanism. Universal Grammar provides representations that support deductions about sentences that fall outside of experience. In addition, these representations define the evidence that learners use to infer a particular grammar. The input is compared with the expected evidence to drive statistical inference. In support of this model, we review evidence of (a) children’s sensitivity to the environment, (b) mismatches between input and intake, (c) the need for learning mechanisms beyond innate representations, and (d) the deductive consequences of children’s acquired syntactic representations.
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Bayesian Model of Categorical Effects in L1 and L2 Speech Processing
A computational model of categorical effects in both first and second language speech perception.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Yakov Kronrod
Dates:
In this dissertation I present a model that captures categorical effects in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) speech perception. In L1 perception, categorical effects range between extremely strong for consonants to nearly continuous perception of vowels. I treat the problem of speech perception as a statistical inference problem and by quantifying categoricity I obtain a unified model of both strong and weak categorical effects. In this optimal inference mechanism, the listener uses their knowledge of categories and the acoustics of the signal to infer the intended productions of the speaker. The model splits up speech variability into meaningful category variance and perceptual noise variance. The ratio of these two variances, which I call Tau, directly correlates with the degree of categorical effects for a given phoneme or continuum. By fitting the model to behavioral data from different phonemes, I show how a single parametric quantitative variation can lead to the different degrees of categorical effects seen in perception experiments with different phonemes. In L2 perception, L1 categories have been shown to exert an effect on how L2 sounds are identified and how well the listener is able to discriminate them. Various models have been developed to relate the state of L1 categories with both the initial and eventual ability to process the L2. These models largely lacked a formalized metric to measure perceptual distance, a means of making a-priori predictions of behavior for a new contrast, and a way of describing non-discrete gradient effects. In the second part of my dissertation, I apply the same computational model that I used to unify L1 categorical effects to examining L2 perception. I show that we can use the model to make the same type of predictions as other SLA models, but also provide a quantitative framework while formalizing all measures of similarity and bias. Further, I show how using this model to consider L2 learners at different stages of development we can track specific parameters of categories as they change over time, giving us a look into the actual process of L2 category development.
The structure-sensitivity of memory access: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese
Interpretation of a reflexive pronoun requires consultation of memory for prior context. What role does the syntax of that context play in guiding that process? Brian Dillon reports a study on Mandarin Chinese.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Brian Dillon, Wing Yee Chow, Matt Wagers, Taomei Guo, Fengqin Liu
Dates:
The present study examined the processing of the Mandarin Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji to evaluate the role that syntactic structure plays in the memory retrieval operations that support sentence comprehension. Using the multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (MR-SAT) paradigm, we measured the speed with which comprehenders retrieve an antecedent for ziji. Our experimental materials contrasted sentences where ziji's antecedent was in the local clause with sentences where ziji's antecedent was in a distant clause. Time course results from MR-SAT suggest that ziji dependencies with syntactically distant antecedents are slower to process than syntactically local dependencies. To aid in interpreting the SAT data, we present a formal model of the antecedent retrieval process, and derive quantitative predictions about the time course of antecedent retrieval. The modeling results support the Local Search hypothesis: during syntactic retrieval, comprehenders initially limit memory search to the local syntactic domain. We argue that Local Search hypothesis has important implications for theories of locality effects in sentence comprehension. In particular, our results suggest that not all locality effects may be reduced to the effects of temporal decay and retrieval interference.
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