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
Case and Grammatical Relations
Masha Polinsky and Omer Preminger on the notion of Abstract Case.
Dates:
Publisher: Routledge
Publisher: Routledge
Masha Polinsky and Omer Preminger on the notion of Abstract Case.
Causal VVs in Mandarin
The syntax and interpretation of Mandarin verbal compounds with a resultative interpretation, in overview.
Contributor(s): Alexander Williams
Dates:
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Many verbal predicates in Mandarin, called VVs, have two parts that can be separated by at most the markers of the positive and negative potential form, de and bu. This chapter surveys the interpretation and syntax of causal VVs, which imply a causal relation between the events of the first and second verb.
Context effects as auditory contrast
Postdoc Michael Key and collaborators show that listeners perceive speech sounds as contrasting auditorily with neighboring sounds, and provide evidence for why.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): John Kingston, Shigeto Kawahara, Della Chambless, Michael Key, Daniel Mash, Sarah Watsky
Dates:
Three experiments are reported that collectively show that listeners perceive speech sounds as contrasting auditorily with neighboring sounds. Experiment 1 replicates the well-established finding that listeners categorize more of a [d–g] continuum as [g] after [l] than after [r]. Experiments 2 and 3 show that listeners discriminate stimuli in which the energy concentrations differ in frequency between the spectra of neighboring sounds better than those in which they do not differ. In Experiment 2, [alga–arda] pairs, in which the energy concentrations in the liquid-stop sequences are H(igh) L(ow)–LH, were more discriminable than [alda–arga] pairs, in which they are HH–LL. In Experiment 3, [da] and [ga] syllables were more easily discriminated when they were preceded by lower and higher pure tones, respectively—that is, tones that differed from the stops’ higher and lower F3 onset frequencies—than when they were preceded by H and L pure tones with similar frequencies. These discrimination results show that contrast with the target’s context exaggerates its perceived value when energy concentrations differ in frequency between the target’s spectrum and its context’s spectrum. Because contrast with its context does more that merely shift the criterion for categorizing the target, it cannot be produced by neural adaptation. The finding that nonspeech contexts exaggerate the perceived values of speech targets also rules out compensation for coarticulation by showing that their values depend on the proximal auditory qualities evoked by the stimuli’s acoustic properties, rather than the distal articulatory gestures.
The role of morphology in phoneme prediction: Evidence from MEG
Allyson Ettinger and co-authors demonstrate the role of morphology and phoneme prediction in spoken word recognition.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Allyson Ettinger, Tal Linzen, Alec Marantz
Dates:
There is substantial neural evidence for the role of morphology (word-internal structure) in visual word recognition. We extend this work to auditory word recognition, drawing on recent evidence that phoneme prediction is central to this process. In a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we crossed morphological complexity (bruis-er vs. bourbon) with the predictability of the word ending (bourbon vs. burble). High prediction error (surprisal) led to increased auditory cortex activity. This effect was enhanced for morphologically complex words. Additionally, we calculated for each timepoint the surprisal corresponding to the phoneme perceived at that timepoint, as well as the cohort entropy, which quantifies the competition among words compatible with the string prefix up to that timepoint. Higher surprisal increased neural activity at the end of the word, and higher entropy decreased neural activity shortly after word onset. These results reinforce the role of morphology and phoneme prediction in spoken word recognition.
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Statistical Insensitivity in the Acquisition of Tsez Noun Classes
How do children acquire noun classes? Annie Gagliardi and Jeff Lidz show that children acquiring Tsez are biased to use phonological over semantic cues, despite a statistical asymmetry in the other direction.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Annie Gagliardi
Dates:
This paper examines the acquisition of noun classes in Tsez, looking in particular at the role of noun-internal distributional cues to class. We present a new corpus of child-directed Tsez speech, analyzing it to determine the proportion of nouns that children hear with this predictive information and how often this is heard in conjunction with overt noun class agreement information. Additionally we present an elicited production experiment that uncovers asymmetries in the classification of nouns with predictive features in the corpus and by children and adults. We show that children use noun-internal distributional information as a cue to noun class out of proportion with its reliability. Instead, children are biased to use phonological over semantic information, despite a statistical asymmetry in the other direction. We end with a discussion of where such a bias could come from.
On Recursion
Norbert Hornstein and co-authors explain how to understand the claim that "recursion" is an essential facet of the human faculty of language, in the narrow sense.
Contributor(s): Norbert HornsteinNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Jeffrey Watumull, Marc D. Hauser, Ian G. Roberts,
Dates:
It is a truism that conceptual understanding of a hypothesis is required for its empirical investigation. However, the concept of recursion as articulated in the context of linguistic analysis has been perennially confused. Nowhere has this been more evident than in attempts to critique and extend Hauser et al.'s. (2002) articulation. These authors put forward the hypothesis that what is uniquely human and unique to the faculty of language—the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN)—is a recursive system that generates and maps syntactic objects to conceptual-intentional and sensory-motor systems. This thesis was based on the standard mathematical definition of recursion as understood by Gödel and Turing, and yet has commonly been interpreted in other ways, most notably and incorrectly as a thesis about the capacity for syntactic embedding. As we explain, the recursiveness of a function is defined independent of such output, whether infinite or finite, embedded or unembedded—existent or non-existent. And to the extent that embedding is a sufficient, though not necessary, diagnostic of recursion, it has not been established that the apparent restriction on embedding in some languages is of any theoretical import. Misunderstanding of these facts has generated research that is often irrelevant to the FLN thesis as well as to other theories of language competence that focus on its generative power of expression. This essay is an attempt to bring conceptual clarity to such discussions as well as to future empirical investigations by explaining three criterial properties of recursion: computability (i.e., rules in intension rather than lists in extension); definition by induction (i.e., rules strongly generative of structure); and mathematical induction (i.e., rules for the principled—and potentially unbounded—expansion of strongly generated structure). By these necessary and sufficient criteria, the grammars of all natural languages are recursive.
Going the distance: Memory and control processes in active dependency construction
Matt Wagers and Colin Phillips probe the representation of displaced NPs in memory. They argue that only very coarse-grained information, such as syntactic category, is actively maintained and used to make parsing decisions.
Contributor(s): Colin PhillipsNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Matthew Wagers
Dates:
Filler–gap dependencies make strong demands on working memory in language comprehension because they cannot always be immediately resolved. In a series of three reading-time studies, we test the idea that these demands can be decomposed into active maintenance processes and retrieval events. Results indicate that the fact that a displaced phrase exists and the identity of its basic syntactic category both immediately impact comprehension at potential gap sites. In contrast, specific lexical details of the displaced phrase show an immediate effect only for short dependencies and a much later effect for longer dependencies. We argue that coarse-grained information about the filler is actively maintained and is used to make phrase structure parsing decisions, whereas finer grained information is more quickly released from active maintenance and consequently has to be retrieved at the gap site.
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Is she patting Katie? Constraints on pronominal reference in 30-month olds
Preferential looking studies show that, already at 30 months, children's understanding of pronouns in "Katie patted herself" and "She patted Katie" are already adult-like.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Anastacia Conroy, Cynthia Lukyanenko,
Dates:
In this study we investigate young children’s knowledge of syntactic constraints on noun phrasereference, by testing 30-month-olds’ interpretation of two types of transitive sentences. In a preferential looking task, we find that children prefer different interpretations for transitive sentences whose object NP is a name (e.g., She’s patting Katie) as compared with those whose object NP is a reflexive pronoun (e.g., She’s patting herself). They map the former onto an other- directed event (one girl patting another) and the latter onto a self-directed event (one girl patting her own head). These preferences are carried by high-vocabulary children in the sample, and suggest that 30-month-olds have begun to distinguish between different types of transitive sentences. Children’s adult-like interpretations are consistent with adherence to Principles A and C of Binding Theory, and suggest that further research using the preferential looking procedure to investigate young children’s knowledge of syntactic constraints may be fruitful.
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No Fear of Commitment: Children’s Incremental Interpretation in English and Japanese Wh-Questions
Akira Omaki and colleagues show that speakers of Japanese, like those of English, have a preference to relate a word like "where" to the first verb they encounter, and that child speakers have trouble overriding the meaning that results.
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Akira Omaki, Imogen Davidson-White, Takuya Goro
Dates:
Much work on child sentence processing has demonstrated that children are able to use various linguistic cues to incrementally resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities, but they fail to use syntactic or interpretability cues that arrive later in the sentence. The present study explores whether children incrementally resolve filler-gap dependencies, using Japanese and English ambiguous wh-questions of the form "Where did Lizzie tell someone that she was gonna catch butterflies?", in which one could answer either the telling location (main clause interpretation) or the butterfly– catching location (embedded clause interpretation). Three story-based experiments demonstrate two novel findings on children’s incremental interpretation of filler-gap dependencies. First, we observe that English-speaking adults and children generally prefer the main clause interpretation, whereas Japanese adults and children both prefer the embedded clause interpretation. As the linear order of main clause and embedded clause predicates differs between English (main first, embedded second) and Japanese (embedded first, main second), the results indicate that adults and children actively associate the wh-phrase with the first predicate in the sentence. Second, Japanese children were unable to inhibit their embedded clause interpretation bias when the sentence was manipulated to syntactically block such analyses. The failure to inhibit the preferred interpretation suggests that the wh-phrase was incrementally associated with the embedded clause. On the other hand, when the sentence was manipulated to semantically block a plausible interpretation for the embedded clause wh-association, children were able to overcome their strong embedded clause interpretation bias and favored the main clause interpretation. These findings suggest that syntactic and interpretability cues may have distinct impacts on children’s sentence comprehension processes.
A role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition
Bayesian models and artificial language learning tasks show that infant acquiosition of phonetic categories can be helpfully constrained by feedback from word segmentation.
Contributor(s): Naomi FeldmanNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Thomas Griffiths, Sharon Goldwater, James Morgan
Dates:
Infants segment words from fluent speech during the same period when they are learning phonetic categories, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which sounds appear. We use a Bayesian model to illustrate how feedback from segmented words might constrain phonetic category learning by providing information about which sounds occur together in words. Simulations demonstrate that word-level information can successfully disambiguate overlapping English vowel categories. Learning patterns in the model are shown to parallel human behavior from artificial language learning tasks. These findings point to a central role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition and provide a framework for incorporating top-down constraints into models of category learning.