Research

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this thesis is to construct a theory to derive how pied-piping of formal features of a moved element takes place, by which some syntactic phenomena related to φ-features can be accounted for. Ura (2001) proposes that pied-piping of formal-features of a moved element is constrained by an economy condition like relativized minimality. On the basis of Ura’s (2001) proposal, I propose that how far an element that undergoes movement can carry its formal features, especially focusing on φ-features in this thesis, is determined by two conditions, a locality condition on the generalized pied-piping and an anti-locality condition on movement. Given the proposed analysis, some patterns of so-called wh-agreement found in Bantu languages can be explained and with the assumption that φ-features play an role for binding, presence or absence of WCO effects in various languages can be derived without recourse to A/A'-distinctions.

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.

Some words are harder to learn than others. For instance, action verbs like run and hit are learned earlier than propositional attitude verbs like think and want. One reason think and want might be learned later is that, whereas we can see and hear running and hitting, we can’t see or hear thinking and wanting. Children nevertheless learn these verbs, so a route other than the senses must exist. There is mounting evidence that this route involves, in large part, inferences based on the distribution of syntactic contexts a propositional attitude verb occurs in—a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. This fact makes the domain of propositional attitude verbs a prime proving ground for models of syntactic bootstrapping.With this in mind, this dissertation has two goals: on the one hand, it aims to construct a computational model of syntactic bootstrapping; on the other, it aims to use this model to investigate the limits on the amount of information about propositional attitude verb meanings that can be gleaned from syntactic distributions. I show throughout the dissertation that these goals are mutually supportive. In Chapter 1, I set out the main problems that drive the investigation. In Chapters 2 and 3, I use both psycholinguistic experiments and computational modeling to establish that there is a significant amount of semantic information carried in both participants’ syntactic acceptability judgments and syntactic distributions in corpora. To investigate the nature of this relationship I develop two computational models: (i) a nonnegative model of (semantic-to-syntactic) projection and (ii) a nonnegative model of syntactic bootstrapping. In Chapter 4, I use a novel variant of the Human Simulation Paradigm to show that the information carried in syntactic distribution is actually utilized by (simulated) learners. In Chapter 5, I present a proposal for how to solve a standing problem in how syntactic bootstrapping accounts for certain kinds of cross-linguistic variation. And in Chapter 6, I conclude with some future directions for this work.

We propose a language production model that uses dynamic discourse information to account for speakers' choices of referring expressions. Our model extends previous rational speech act models (Frank and Goodman, 2012) to more naturally distributed linguistic data, instead of assuming a controlled experimental setting. Simulations show a close match between speakers' utterances and model predictions, indicating that speakers' behavior can be modeled in a principled way by considering the probabilities of referents in the discourse and the information conveyed by each word.

Prior research suggests that prediction of semantic and syntactic information prior to the bottom-up input is an important component of language comprehension. Recent work in basic visual and auditory perception suggests that the ability to predict features of an upcoming stimulus is even more valuable when the exact timing of the stimulus presentation can also be predicted. However, it is unclear whether lexical-semantic predictions are similarly locked to a particular time, as previous studies of semantic predictability have used a predictable presentation rate. In the current study we vary the temporal predictability of target word presentation in the visual modality and examine the consequences for effects of semantic predictability on the event-related N400 response component, as measured with magnetoencephalography (MEG). Although we observe robust effects of semantic predictability on the N400 response, we find no evidence that these effects are larger in the presence of temporal predictability. These results suggest that, at least in the visual modality, lexical-semantic predictions may be maintained over a broad time-window, which could allow predictive facilitation to survive the presence of optional modifiers in natural language settings. The results also indicate that the mechanisms supporting predictive facilitation may vary in important ways across tasks and cognitive domains.