Reviews and Comments by Jeffrey Lidz
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2008
The conceptual building blocks suggested by developmental psychologists may yet play a role in ho... more The conceptual building blocks suggested by developmental psychologists may yet play a role in how the human learner arrives at an understanding of natural number. The proposal of Rips et al. faces a challenge, yet to be met, faced by all developmental proposals: to describe the logical space in which learners ever acquire new concepts.
Papers by Jeffrey Lidz
Abstract: In a head final language, verb-raising is hard to detect since there is no evidence fro... more Abstract: In a head final language, verb-raising is hard to detect since there is no evidence from the string to support a raising analysis. This is so both for children acquiring the language and for linguists developing an analysis of it. If the language has a clitic-like negation that associates with the verb in syntax, then scope facts concerning negation and a quantified object NP could provide evidence regarding the height of the verb. Even so, such facts are rare, especially in the input to children, and so we might be led to expect that not all speakers exposed to a head-final language acquire the same grammar as far as verb-raising is concerned. In this paper, we present evidence supporting this expectation. Using experimental data concerning the scope of quantified NPs and negation in Korean, extracted from both adults and 4 year-old children, we show that there are two populations of Korean speakers: one with verb-raising and one without.
Interpretation of a pronoun is driven by properties of syntactic distribution. Consequently, acqu... more Interpretation of a pronoun is driven by properties of syntactic distribution. Consequently, acquiring the meaning and the dis-tribution are intertwined. In order to learn that a pronoun is re-flexive, learners need to know which entity the pronoun refers to in a sentence, but in order to infer its referent they need to know that the pronoun is reflexive. This study examines whether discourse information is the information source that the learner might use to acquire grammatical categories of pro-nouns. Experimental results demonstrate that adults can use discourse information to accurately guess the referents of pro-nouns. Simulations show that a Bayesian model using guesses from the experiment as an estimate of the discourse informa-tion successfully categorizes English pronouns into categories corresponding to reflexives and non-reflexives. Together, these results suggest that knowing which entities are likely to be re-ferred to in the discourse can help learners acquire grammati...
This article examines the distribution of accusative case morphology in Kannada, detailing the sy... more This article examines the distribution of accusative case morphology in Kannada, detailing the syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors that contribute to its occurrence. Accusative case morphology is optional on inanimate direct objects. When optional, its presence indicates a specific reading, which I argue is best modeled as a choice function. The specific readings due to morpho-logical form are distinct from specific readings that arise from syntactic position. Positional specificity is detectable only on morphologically noncasemarked object NPs. When the accusative case morpheme is obligatory, specificity effects are positional and not due to the presence of the morpheme. In this situation, additional morphology is required to achieve an inherently specific interpretation, suggesting a separation between morphological signals and meaning.* 1. INTRODUCTION. Languages
dynamic and static speech events
Children's abilities to acquire novel words tell us about the hypothesised word meanings tha... more Children's abilities to acquire novel words tell us about the hypothesised word meanings that children entertain. We investigate children's abilities to learn a range of determiner meanings that are not attested in natural languages. For those unattested determiners that children do not successfully learn, we propose that their typological absence is due to an inherent property of the language faculty that prevents determiners (a class of words defined distributionally) from taking on those meanings. Specifically, we find that the lack of nonconservative determiners in the world's language may be due to this kind of constraint, while the lack of determiners with the meaning “less than half ” can not be. We conducted a number of experiments testing the abilities of four- and five-year-old children to learn various novel determiners, using a variant of the “picky puppet task ” (Waxman & Gelman, 1986). Children are familiarised with a puppet who has an unknown criterion ...
The universal quantifiers each and every can both be used to label the same situations in the wor... more The universal quantifiers each and every can both be used to label the same situations in the world. Even so, they differ semantically in subtle ways (§2). In particular, they differ at least with respect to (i) whether they allow pair-list answers in response to questions, (ii) their compatibility with certain “generic” interpretations, and (iii) the extent to which they encourage treating the domain of quantification as independent individuals or as members of a larger group. This raises an acquisition question (§3): what evidence do learners use to infer the meanings of each and every? Here, we report on a corpus analysis of child-ambient speech suggesting that parents use each to talk about a local domain and use every to make broad generalizations that project beyond the local domain. These differences in use come with lower-level concomitants, like quantifying over individuals versus times, or being the argument of a verb as opposed to a topic-setting adjunct (§4). Since these...
Preschoolers have long been reported to have non-adult-like interpretations of belief verbs like ... more Preschoolers have long been reported to have non-adult-like interpretations of belief verbs like think. They seem to assume that think only reports true beliefs and reject think-sentences when the complement clause is false but the whole sentence is true (Wellman et al. 2001 a.o.). For example, in a scenario where it’s sunny outside but Taoqi thinks it’s raining, children tend to judge (1b) as false.
In languages like English, this type of question involves movement of the wh-word from its base p... more In languages like English, this type of question involves movement of the wh-word from its base position to the matrix [Spec, CP]. However, in some other adult languages of the world, such as German, in addition to this possibility, one can also pronounce the wh-element in intermediate position, as shown in the examples below (example (2) taken from Hiemstra, 1986: 99 and example (3) taken from Klepp 2002: 111/112):
We explore here how a child’s ability to parse sentences interacts with language learning. Does t... more We explore here how a child’s ability to parse sentences interacts with language learning. Does the manner in which a child recovers syntactic structure have important consequences for acquisition of the lexicon or parts of the grammar that depend on the information successfully recovered from the parse? It is now well established that the syntactic structure of a sentence contributes significantly to the learning of word meanings, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman, 1990). For example, in one such study by Naigles (1990), young children heard simple sentences describing the actions of a duck and a bunny. When they heard a transitive sentence involving a novel verb, like “The duck is kradding the bunny”, 25-month olds were found to spend more time looking at a video of a causal action in which the bunny was acting on the duck as compared to a video of two simple motion events. And critically, this preference was not seen when children instead heard an intransiti...
over different utterances of that word that show wide variation in acoustic features due either t... more over different utterances of that word that show wide variation in acoustic features due either to differences between speakers, to effects of coarticulation with surrounding words, or to phonological rules that alter the form of the word (e.g. electric/electricity). (See Saffran, Werker, & Werner, Chatper 2, this Volume for an excellent review; also Aslin, Saffran, & Newport, 1998; Fisher, Church, & Chambers, 2004; Fisher & Tokura, 1996; Jusczyk, 1997; Mehler et al., 1988; Morgan & Demuth, 1996). The third piece of the word-learning puzzle—establishing a mapping between the conceptual and linguistic units—is also much richer than it appears at first glance. It is a universal feature of human language that many kinds of words (e.g., nouns, adjectives, verbs) can be applied correctly in the very same naming episode, and that each kind of word highlights a unique aspect of that episode and supports a unique pattern of extension. Consider again the vision of puppies playing in the park...
Children’s knowledge of the passive (or possible lack thereof) has given rise to a lot of interes... more Children’s knowledge of the passive (or possible lack thereof) has given rise to a lot of interesting research on language acquisition. One reason that the passive has continued to be an active area of research is because children exhibit seemingly quite late mastery of the passive, relative to other aspects of their target grammar. For the most part, there is consensus in the literature on children’s acquisition of the passive about two things, at least for English-acquiring children. First, children have difficulty comprehending passive sentences until they are late into their third year of age or even the beginning of their fourth year of age. Second, even when children begin to comprehend passive sentences, they still fail to comprehend passive sentences of nonactional verbs, perhaps even beyond their sixth year of age (see, e.g., Hirsch & Wexler 2006). This second aspect of the developmental trajectory (i.e., the asymmetry in comprehension of passives of actional verbs on the o...
... The effect of perceived speaker age on the perception of PIN and PEN vowels in Houston, Texas... more ... The effect of perceived speaker age on the perception of PIN and PEN vowels in Houston, Texas Christian Koops ∗ Elizabeth Gentry Andrew Pantos ... perception of PIN and PEN vowels in Houston, Texas ∗ Christian Koops, Elizabeth Gentry, and Andrew Pantos Abstract ...
According to the Lexicalist Hypothesis, morphological structure is built inthe lexicon by process... more According to the Lexicalist Hypothesis, morphological structure is built inthe lexicon by processes distinct from those that build syntactic structure.The structure of morphologically complex words is erased upon insertioninto a syntactic phrase-marker and hence, is invisible to sentence-level opera-tions and descriptions (Chomsky 1981, DiScullo and Williams 1987, Kipar-sky 1982, Mohanan 1981). Hand in hand with this morphosyntactic hy-pothesis are the following morphosemantic and morphophonological claims.First, some structure-meaning correspondences are created in the lexicon andhence are idiosyncratic, as in (1a, b), while others are created in the syntaxand hence are transparently compositional, as in (1c).(1) a. /kaet/ = CATb. /trans+mit+ion/ = PART OF A CARc. a cat sleeps = SLEEP(CAT)Second, some phonological rules apply in the lexicon, and hence can haveidiosyncratic properties (e.g., English trisyllabic laxing: (2a) vs (2b)), whileothers apply postsyntactically (or everywher...
This paper explores the granularity with which a word’s semantic properties are recoverable from ... more This paper explores the granularity with which a word’s semantic properties are recoverable from its syntactic distribution, taking propositional attitude verbs (PAVs), such as think and want, as a case study. Three behavioral experiments aimed at quantifying the relationship between PAV semantic properties and PAV syntactic distribution are reported. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of PAV syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2 and 3 gather measures of semantic similarity between those same PAVs using a generalized semantic discrimination (triad or “odd man out”) task and an ordinal (likert) scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to classifications of PAVs derived from traditional distributional analysis. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directl...
Thorough investigation of early syntactic knowledge necessitates methodologies that tap young chi... more Thorough investigation of early syntactic knowledge necessitates methodologies that tap young children's linguistic competence while minimizing extra-linguistic demands and not relying on production. The preferential looking paradigm is uniquely suited to such a task. We present here a test case for the exploration of early syntactic knowledge in young children: Principle C effects at 30 months. Our investigation serves two goals: first, to utilize the fine-grained temporal information available in preferential looking data to identify the response pattern to sentences in Principle C contexts. We show that all children at 30 months show adult-like restriction of interpretation in Principle C contexts. Second, we utilize individual variation in the response pattern to identify the underlying knowledge driving this observable behavior. We show that variation in processing speed at the syntactic but not the lexical level predicts speed of interpretation in Principle C contexts. Thi...
Our research replicates and extends previous work on infant audio-visual speech perception [3], [... more Our research replicates and extends previous work on infant audio-visual speech perception [3], [4], [5], demonstrating that two-month-old infants have knowledge of the audio-visual connection between the visual aspects of lip-posture and the pronunciation of vowels and glides. Using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm [6] the infants display a clear ability to distinguish /a/-/u/, /i/-/u/ and /i/-/wi/. The infants’ ability to discriminate /i/-/wi/ shows that even dynamic aspects of speech production within single syllables are salient to the infants.
Annual Review of Linguistics
Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cue... more Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few case studies, we show how children make use of syntactic and pragmatic cues to figure out attitude verb meanings and how their successes, and even their mistakes, reveal remarkable conceptual, linguistic, and pragmatic sophistication. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
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Reviews and Comments by Jeffrey Lidz
Papers by Jeffrey Lidz