Research

"Parameters" are abstract features of grammar that govern many different observable structures and may vary across languages. Lisa Pearl and Jeff Lidz explore how this notion is used in theories of typology and acquisition.

Infants begin to segment words from fluent speech during the same time period that they learn phonetic categories. Segmented words can provide a potentially useful cue for phonetic learning, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore the contexts in which sounds appear. We present two experiments to show that, contrary to the assumption that phonetic learning occurs in isolation, learners are sensitive to the words in which sounds appear and can use this information to constrain their interpretation of phonetic variability. Experiment 1 shows that adults use word-level information in a phonetic category learning task, assigning acoustically similar vowels to different categories more often when those sounds consistently appear in different words. Experiment 2 demonstrates that eight-month-old infants similarly pay attention to word-level information and that this information affects how they treat phonetic contrasts. These findings suggest that phonetic category learning is a rich, interactive process that takes advantage of many different types of cues that are present in the input.

Recent observations of unexpected ERP responses to grammatically well-formed role reversed sentences (the “Semantic P600” phenomenon) have been taken to bear directly on questions about the architecture of the language processing system. This paper evaluates two central pieces of evidence for accounts that propose a syntax-independent semantic composition mechanism, namely, the presence of P600 effects and the absence of N400 effects in role reversed sentences. Experiment 1 examined the relative contribution of the presence of an animacy violation and the semantic relations between words (‘combinability’) to the ERP responses to role-reversed sentences. Experiment 2 examined the ERP responses to role-reversed sentences that are fully animacy-congruous. Results from the two experiments showed that animacy-violated sentences with no plausible non-surface interpretation elicited the same P600 effect as both types of role-reversed sentences; additionally, semantically anomalous target words elicited no N400 effects when they were strongly semantically related to the preceding words, regardless of the presence of animacy violations. Taken together, these findings suggest that the presence of P600s to role-reversed sentences can be attributed to the implausibility of the sentence meaning, and the absence of N400 effects is due to a combination of weak contextual constraints and strong lexical association. The presence of a plausible non-surface interpretation and animacy violations made no unique contribution to the ERP response profiles. Hence, existing ERP findings are compatible with the long-held assumption that online semantic composition is dependent on surface syntax and do not constitute evidence for a syntax-independent semantic composition mechanism.

An important distinction between phonology and syntax has been overlooked. All phonological patterns belong to the regular region of the Chomsky Hierarchy, but not all syntactic patterns do. We argue that the hypothesis that humans employ distinct learning mechanisms for phonology and syntax currently offers the best explanation for this difference.

In some Arabic dialects pre-verbal coordinated subjects cause plural agreement on the verb while post-verbal ones cause either plural agreement or singular agreement. This paradigm has been addressed by Aoun, Benmamoun, and Sportiche (1994, 1999) and Munn (1999) to varying degrees of success. This reply offers an improvement on the previous analyses by utilizing the concept of decomposed merge (Hornstein 2009) whereby merge is reanalyzed as two suboperations. Previously unexplained cases that flaunt the paradigm are explained here by a decomposition of the extension condition (Chomsky 1995) and a derivational account of pronoun binding across coordination.

When a word is preceded by a supportive context such as a semantically associated word or a strongly constraining sentence frame, the N400 component of the ERP is reduced in amplitude. An ongoing debate is the degree to which this reduction reflects a passive spread of activation across long-term semantic memory representations as opposed to specific predictions about upcoming input. We addressed this question by embedding semantically associated prime-target pairs within an experimental context that encouraged prediction to a greater or lesser degree. The proportion of related items was used to manipulate the predictive validity of the prime for the target while holding semantic association constant. A semantic category probe detection task was used to encourage semantic processing and to preclude the need for a motor response on the trials of interest. A larger N400 reduction to associated targets was observed in the high than the low relatedness proportion condition, consistent with the hypothesis that predictions about upcoming stimuli make a substantial contribution to the N400 effect. We also observed an earlier priming effect (205-240 ms) in the high proportion condition, which may reflect facilitation due to form-based prediction. In sum, the results suggest that predictability modulates N400 amplitude to a greater degree than the semantic content of the context.

Children under 4 years have been claimed to lack adult-­like semantic representations of belief verbs like think. Based on two experiments involving a truth-­value judgment task, we argue that 4-­year olds' apparently deviant interpretations arise from pragmatic difficulty understanding the relevance of belief, rather than from conceptual or semantic immaturity.  

We argue that there is an implicit view in psycholinguistics that phonological acquisition is a 'two-stage' process: phonetic categories are first acquired, and then subsequently mapped onto abstract phoneme categories. We present simulations that suggest two problems with this view: first, the learner might mistake the phoneme-level categories for phonetic-level categories and thus be unable to learn the relationships between phonetic-level categories; on the other hand, the learner might construct inaccurate phonetic-level representations that prevent it from finding regular relations among them. We suggest an alternative conception of the phonological acquisition problem that sidesteps this apparent inevitability, and present a Bayesian model that acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using acoustic data from Inuktitut, we show that this model reliably converges on a set of phoneme-level categories and phonetic-level relations among subcategories, without making use of a lexicon.

I make two proposals in this article: (a) an economy condition on the operation Copy, which states that Copy should apply to as small an element as possible, and (b) the “two types of head movement” hypothesis, which states that Universal Grammar allows head movement via substitution as well as head movement via adjunction. I argue that with these proposals, we can not only explain two generalizations about what I call headless XPs, but also attribute crosslinguistic variation in the applicability of these generalizations to parameters that are responsible for the availability of multiple specifiers.

This paper develops the observation that, for many predicates, Null Complement Anaphora (NCA) is like anaphora with a descriptively empty definite description (Condoravdi & Gawron 1996, Gauker 2012). I consider how to distinguish this sort of NCA from pronouns theoretically, and then observe an unnoticed exception to the pattern. For verbs like notice, NCA is neither like a definite description nor like a pronoun, raising a new puzzle of how to represent it.