Jeffrey Lidz, PhD - US grants

syntax; verbal learning; semantics; child psychology; psycholinguistics; early experience; behavioral /social science research tag; human subject; child (0-11); clinical research;

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Jeffrey Lidz will conduct three years of developmental linguistic research on the syntax, semantics and use of quantificational expressions (e.g., two birds, every horse) in English and Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken by approximately 40 million people in southern India. The project uses the grammar and acquisition of quantification across diverse languages as a probe into the relative contributions of innate knowledge and linguistic experience in language acquisition. Previous research has shown that children systematically fail to detect both interpretations of ambiguous sentences like "every horse didn't jump over the fence," interpreting them as meaning only that no horses jumped. This observation holds for children learning English and Kannada, despite the many apparent differences between these two languages. This project will examine the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors that contribute to this effect, with two aims in mind. First, the project will determine whether children's errors are due their lacking the correct representations of the quantificational expressions or to their abilities to put their knowledge to use. Second, the project will examine the role of experience in leading children towards ultimately understanding such sentences like adults.

The research component of the project involves language acquisition experiments with English- and Kannada-speaking children. The project also develops a program of training for graduate and undergraduate students which provides them with the skills required for active involvement in integrated research in theoretical and developmental linguistics. By comparing acquisition in children learning English and Kannada, the project expands the range of data typically used in theoretical linguistics and extends collaborations between American and Indian researchers.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will explore the relationship between word meaning and syntactic distribution through a series of studies of infant language learning. In particular, I will examine the interaction between syntax and noun-meaning in the acquisition of novel verbs. While it is by now well-established that children can use syntactic information to guide the acquisition of novel verbs, this project asks about the relative contributions of purely syntactic information and the meanings of co-occurring nouns as sources of information for infant verb-learners. This project represents the first step in a longer program of research on infant verb learning. Here, I will examine the acquisition of intransitive manner of motion verbs by English-learning infants in a range of experimental conditions. In particular, I will examine whether infants can learn a novel verb when it is presented with its semantic arguments but no syntax, when it is presented with syntactic arguments that do not rigidly denote any object (e.g., pronouns), when it is presented with syntactic arguments that are themselves novel nouns, and when it is presented with known nouns serving as syntactic arguments. By manipulating the syntactic and semantic information conveyed in the presentation of a novel verb, we can better determine the information that infant language learners use in identifying the meaning of novel verbs in general. A second aim is to identify the importance of syntactic and semantic information in verb learning as a function of the learner's current state of knowledge. The latter aim will be achieved by testing infants across the second year of life. Results of this project will feed into work examining a broader range of verb classes and a broader range of languages, so that a maximally general theory of the relative contributions of syntactic and lexical information to verb learning can be developed. This basic research will inform theories of normal linguistic development and may ultimately lead to insights concerning language acquisition in bilingual environments and by children with specific language impairments.

A central problem for a theory of language acquisition is to determine how children learn both what is possible and what is not possible. This problem is especially acute for phenomena residing at the boundary between syntax and semantics, where (a) the mapping from surface form to meaning is often complex and (b) languages vary in how form and meaning align. This project aims to use the acquisition of language-specific constraints on scope interpretation as a probe into the character of the syntax-semantics mapping and the learning of this mapping. Several constructions in Japanese do not show scope ambiguities that the corresponding English sentences exhibit. Under the direction of Dr. Colin Phillips and Dr. Jeffrey Lidz, Mr. Takuya Goro will investigate Japanese preschool children's interpretations of those constructions, using the Truth Value Judgment Task. The results from the project will expand the empirical coverage of studies on the acquisition of scope. Much previous research in this domain has investigated the pragmatic and processing constraints that might underlie children's bias for surface scope interpretations of scopally ambiguous sentences. In contrast, this project focuses on children's mastery of constraints that exclude certain scope interpretations. The project will also contribute to an improved understanding of the mechanism that is involved in the acquisition of language-specific constraints on scope interpretations Furthermore, the project will determine whether children have initial biases towards particular kinds of interpretations, and will therefore contribute to an understanding of the initial state of language learning. One broader impact of the study is that the research project will help to establish new partnerships for language acquisition research on Japanese, based on developing institutional connections with preschools, and training Japanese researchers in state-of-the-art research methods in the study of language development. Partnerships with preschools are common in the US, but relatively rare in Japan. The new relationships developed in this way will benefit not only this research project, but also future international collaborations on comparative language acquisition studies on Japanese and English.

Human language is both universal within the species and highly variable across populations. This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) project will train young scientists and engineers to understand language diversity by combining the tools of behavioral, computational and biological research, drawing upon an extensive collaborative network that spans nine departments in five colleges at the University of Maryland. The project aims to promote sustainable change in the science of language by building infrastructure for interdisciplinary research on diverse languages through local and international collaborations and outreach efforts, by strengthening links between basic science and clinical and engineering applications, and by building awareness of the science of language through high school and undergraduate partnerships. The training plan provides coursework, research training, and an environment geared towards preparing students for interdisciplinary research and equipping them to build collaborative networks in their future careers. Preparation for interdisciplinary research will be provided by broad coursework, integrative pro-seminars and a post-candidacy lab rotation that will pair trainees with students from other disciplines. A central component of the project is the Winter Storm, an intensive two-week workshop that will provide foundational skills training, research planning, and professional development. The project will enhance the use of computational and neuroscientific techniques in studies of atypical language and second language learning, and will partner with an NSF-supported Science of Learning Center based at Gallaudet University that focuses on visual language. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Language learners must identify linguistic properties that differ across languages in the language input that surrounds them, and much recent research has explored the potential importance of distributional regularities in the language input for successful learning. However, other recent findings on child sentence understanding have shown that children's immature language comprehension system is prone to mis-parsing of the input. This raises the possibility that informative distributional information might be missed by the learner: if a child misanalyzes sentences in the input, then the true input distribution from the perspective of adults and researchers may be different from the 'intake', i.e., the effective input distribution that feeds into the language learning mechanism. This project investigates this issue through studies of incremental sentence parsing and reanalysis in question constructions in English and Japanese.

Under the direction of Dr. Colin Phillips and Dr. Jeffrey Lidz, Mr. Akira Omaki will conduct studies using eye-tracking, question-after-story and truth value judgment measures in English and Japanese in order to assess a) whether children, like adults, make early commitments to the interpretation of questions ('active dependency processing'), and b) whether children are able to successfully reanalyze in cases where their initial interpretation turns out to be incorrect. The experimental findings will be supplemented with a corpus analysis and a computational modeling study will be combined with the experimental findings, in order to generate an estimate of how the distribution of wh-question constructions appears from a child's perspective. A novel feature of the project is that it combines experimental and corpus-based approaches to gain an understanding of how children's language comprehension system might lead them to apprehend distributional regularities that do not correspond to what is actually present in their input. Thus, one broader impact of the project is that it could have important implications for any research that emphasizes the role of distributional regularities in the language acquisition process. A second broader impact of the project is that it will help to establish new partnerships for language acquisition research on Japanese, based on developing institutional connections with preschools, and will facilitate future international collaborations on comparative language acquisition studies.

This dissertation research will investigate the bilingual abilities of heritage language speakers, in order to determine the relative importance of timing and experience in bilingual language development. Both heritage (Korean) and dominant (English) language features will be examined, including the ability to process vocabulary in real-time, detect grammatical errors, and distinguish similar but different speech sounds. The primary goal is to disambiguate the contributions of early exposure (to Korean) and input dominance (of English) to early bilingual competence. A secondary goal is to identify which linguistic domains are most vulnerable to language loss/incomplete acquisition, as well as which factors contribute to the development of balanced language proficiency.

The vocabulary experiment is designed to determine whether the asymmetric masked priming effect (L1-L2 only) observed in adult second language learners is replicated by heritage speakers. A grammaticality judgment task is employed to examine whether heritage speakers resolve the learnability problem (Pinker, 1989) in the acquisition of locative alternation and quantifier float. The speech perception experiment will test the ability to distinguish the /sta~suta/ contrast, something difficult for Koreans, as well as Korean contrasts that are difficult for English native-speakers (/s~ss/).

In addition to experimental data, biographical information and proficiency test results will be collected. The collective findings should make several important intellectual and social contributions to the field. Intellectually, it will help disambiguate the effects of early experience and language dominance, both of which have often been confounded in previous studies. Socially, such data are invaluable for teachers and parents who might be struggling to understand heritage language development and who want to help immigrants with English language development and heritage language maintenance. Other social scientists, educators, parents, and policymakers will also benefit from the research findings of this dissertation as the results can inform general bilingual education in the U.S.

This project investigates how children come to learn the meaning of verbs that describe mental states such a "think" or "want". Such verbs are important for several reasons: first, unlike action verbs like "run," they describe internal states that are not easily observable. Second, such verbs have often been used as a window into children's understanding of other people's minds. Children seem to make consistent mistakes in their understanding of verbs like "think". This is often taken to reflect an initial inability to attribute mental states (such as beliefs) to others (so-called 'theory of mind'). However, our understanding of children's linguistic representation of mental verbs at various stages of development is lacking in important ways. Yet, such an understanding is crucial before causal claims can be made about the connection between language and theory of mind. Several factors could be responsible for children's linguistic mistakes. In particular, we explore the hypothesis that the difficulty children experience with these verbs is neither conceptual, nor grammatical in nature, but derives from mastering how these verbs are used in conversation.

One of the central aims of this research is to develop tools for determining whether success or failure in some linguistic task is driven by grammatical knowledge or the reasoning associated with using this knowledge. Consequently, this research will have clear implications for language delay, and disorders of language and cognition, such as Autism. In addition, this project will provide funding and research experience to graduate and undergraduate students. Graduate students working on the project will serve as near-peer mentors to the undergraduate students. This arrangement provides graduate students with mentoring experience, better preparing them for research positions, and providing a model for graduate training beyond individual research.

Having strong linguistic ability is crucial for becoming a productive member of society. However, there remain many unanswered questions regarding how young children, who start out with no language whatsoever, learn this complex and crucial ability. The answer to these questions not only has educational ramifications but may also provide important insights into the root causes of such matters as the increased prevalence of cognitive-linguistic disorders and socioeconomic-status-based differences in learning outcomes. The issues examined in this dissertation project relate to how young children learn the meanings of verbs: Verbs constitute the core of a language's sentences, so understanding how verbs are learned is key to understanding how children learn language more generally. Some verbs are harder for children to learn than others. For instance, action verbs like "run" and "hit" are learned earlier than mental verbs like "believe" and "want". One reason "believe" and "want" might be learned later is that, whereas we can see and hear running and hitting events, we can't see or hear thinking and wanting. Children nevertheless learn these verbs, so a route other than the senses must exist. This research investigates what that route is using methods from linguistic theory, cognitive science, and computer science to examine one promising proposal: that children use the sentence contexts a verb occurs in to infer its meaning.

The research will examine theories of how children leverage the fact that similarity in sentence context seems to correspond to similarity in verb meaning. To answer this question, this research will exploit experimental methods for measuring the effect of contextual information on verb learning. The investigators will measure these effects on performance in artificial grammar learning experiments using Mechanical Turk for data collection. The researchers will incorporate the findings from these experiments into a computational model of the cognitive processes that allow children to learn words. This second step is useful both scientifically and practically. On the one hand, it will result in a deeper understanding of the mental processes that underlie language learning. On the other, it will provide a model of cognitive development that will help predict the effect that differences in the language spoken to children--for instance, those conditioned by socioeconomic status--have on language learning outcomes.

Language acquisition stands as the signature intellectual achievement of the human species. The scientific study of language acquisition relates patterns of first and second language acquisition to detailed hypotheses about developing grammatical representations, the mechanisms by which these representations are acquired, and the information processing mechanisms through which these representations are engaged in real time language use by first and second language learners. The 6th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition -- North America conference, to be held February 19-21, 2015, will bring together researchers examining all aspects of first and second language acquisition. The conference will host a special session focusing on the computational mechanisms through which learners use the language they are exposed to to build a particular grammar. This special session will both introduce cutting edge computational methods to the broader developmental linguistics community and spur new links between empirical research on children's language development with explicit computational models of language learning. The special theme of the conference will encourage collaboration and further research in this area, extending the range of data that computational linguists see as relevant to modeling acquisition and highlighting the importance for developmental linguists of thinking about the role of input and the mechanisms that use it in shaping language acquisition.

The core of the conference is a series of invited talks by six prominent researchers with relevant expertise. Together, the speakers address key issues in language learning spanning syntax, phonology, morphology, bilingualism and heritage language acquisition, and bring together a diverse range of theoretical and methodological approaches. In addition, the conference encourages broad participation. Four of the six invited speakers are women and the conference provides travel awards to graduate student presenters. The papers of the invited speakers will be published in Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics.

Language is used to communicate ideas and transfer information because it can reflect what our individual beliefs are and what our shared beliefs are. As one example, the way that words like "know" and "think" are used within a conversation reflects how sure the conversational participants are about what they believe, whether they agree about what they are discussing, and what they take to be facts or opinions. This project examines how children come to understand how belief words like "know" and "think" contribute to the exchange of information within a conversation. Do children from different backgrounds have similar experiences with these words? And to the degree that there are differences, how does that variation contribute to differences in acquiring an adult-like understanding of these words? To answer these questions, this project first conducts corpus analyses to investigate how parents use belief words in talking to their preschool-aged children. Then, these corpus results are combined with behavioral methods to reveal how linguistic experience relates to children's mastery of these words.

Finding out how children come to learn words like "know" and "think" is important in understanding contributing factors to later academic and professional success. Specifically, these words require an understanding of the ways that information is exchanged and communicated through conversations. As a result, understanding these words leads to mastery in interpreting what their conversational partners believe and why they believe it. This, in turn, allows children to better understand academic and professional communication and may lead to greater achievement in school, and ultimately, in their careers.

Every community around the world has a language. In each community, within a few years and with high accuracy, children learn the language of their environment. Achieving high proficiency in at least one language is critical for learning the culture of the community, connecting with peers, and accessing an education. When language is delayed, other aspects of development may also be at risk. Studying how language develops in children is therefore of great importance, both for understanding how language interacts with other systems, and for identifying and diagnosing language delays. Although children learn language quickly, they continue to make some errors well after they achieve high proficiency in their first language. These errors, because they are so rare, provide useful insights into the mechanisms of language development. Many of the general cognitive processes proposed to interact with language in adults are known to develop much later than language, raising the question: to what extent are children's linguistic errors due to extra-linguistic processes, rather than incomplete linguistic knowledge?

This research uses children's understanding of adjunct control, as in "John bumped Mary after tripping on the sidewalk," as a case study to investigate this question. For this sentence, adults only access a meaning in which John tripped, while children have been reported to exhibit a much wider range of interpretations, in which John, Mary or anyone tripped. All accounts to date of adjunct control in children have cited incomplete knowledge as the source of children's interpretations; this research pursues an alternative account--that children's knowledge is complete, but the extra-linguistic processing mechanisms are more error-prone in children than in adults, masking children's knowledge in contexts with a high processing load. Based on the manipulations used with similar types of sentences in adult sentence processing, this research investigates the effects of processing load on children's interpretations of sentences with adjunct control. At stake is a more continuous account that relates children's errors for adjunct control to parallel effects in adults, and presents the opportunity for future research to investigate other sentence types, the development of processing mechanisms, and how immature processing mechanisms affect language development. This research also includes an outreach component to local families and high schools, and will provide research experience to an undergraduate research assistant.

Children acquire their first language within a few years, and without explicit deliberation. Their task is extremely complex. They must come to perceive countless gestures or sounds as having the structure of sentences, with subjects, verbs, and so on. At the same time, they must come to understand how these sentences depict the world around them, as it is lived and portrayed by their caretakers and peers. How do they do this? Answering this question requires understanding how they experience both the language and the world around them, at each stage of their development. This research aims at one central part of the problem: how do infants learn the meanings of transitive verbs, those with a subject and object?

This project approaches the problem from two directions. First, can children younger than 2 correctly perceive the category of 'transitive verb'? This may be difficult, because such verbs may occur in a variety of contexts that obscure their category, such as questions where the direct object occurs at the start of the sentence: "What did Mary see?" Second, how do children at this age tend to represent the events around them? Which aspects of an event are or are not salient to them? With some answers to both questions, the project moves on to asking what expectations children have about the connection between the syntax of transitive verbs and their meanings, expectations that might help them learn. This research will deepen our understanding of the relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic representations, and how these change in the early stages of language development. Moreover, this work employs methods not previously used in research on the acquisition of syntax, expanding the range of methods available for others. Significant effort will also be directed towards outreach events in which graduate and undergraduate students working on the project will engage with high school and middle school students about the importance of linguistic research in general, and about the broader societal lessons that can be drawn from research on infant language learners.

A word like ?cat? calls to mind different associations for different individuals (e.g., allergic reactions versus comforting companion). But at the same time, whatever meaning English speakers have paired with the word ?cat? must be at least similar enough to enable successful communication. This suggests some level of invariance in meaning, but leaves open the level of detail at which our understanding of the word is shared. If speakers do share fine-grained details about a word?s meaning, the question of how they acquired those details arises. No two children have the exact same experience in the course of language learning, so how would they come to have a common understanding of a word? This project explores both questions ? what aspect of word meaning is shared across speakers and how is this meaning acquired? ? for the quantificational words ?each? and ?every?. Gaining a better understanding of how speakers represent and acquire these words will improve our understanding of the logical primitives of thought and the ways in which children make use of their input when learning a language.

The research brings together approaches from various fields. Vision science experiments test participants? memory for set and individual properties to determine whether the meanings of ?each? and ?every? implicate representations of sets. A linguistic corpus analysis identifies the data present in speech to children. Techniques from developmental psychology are used to test whether children in fact use these cues in learning the relevant difference between ?each? and ?every?. The project pursues the hypothesis that while a sentence like ?every circle is green? implicates representations of sets (the set of circles), the minimally different ?each circle is green? implicates only representations of individuals and their properties. The project also involves conducting outreach about related issues (e.g., the relationship between language and thought more generally) to local families and high school students.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

In general, it is possible to form a question by 'moving' a wh-phrase like "who” or "which boy" out of a seemingly arbitrary number of clauses, as in "Who did Allie say that Amy saw?", "Who did Alicia hear that Allie said that Amy saw?", and so on. In these questions, "who" is the logical object of "saw" yet appears at the beginning of the sentence. However, there are certain syntactic environments, commonly called 'islands,' in which question formation is not possible. A question like "Who did the book by delight everyone?"--whose intended meaning is 'who is the person such that the book by that person delighted everyone'--sounds unnatural to speakers of English, suggesting that it is not a possible question despite having a reasonable meaning. Some linguists have claimed that these constraints disappear when the offending structure is elided, such as in a sentence like "Amy said that the book by someone delighted everyone, but I don't remember who". Such sentences sound a bit more natural to speakers of English, but their status isn't entirely clear. This dissertation project will advance linguistic theory by using recent experimental techniques to ascertain whether such sentences are grammatical. In advancing the field, this project will also support education and diversity by training an undergraduate research assistant in these experimental techniques, scientific thinking, and statistical analysis.

Using behavioral methods, this doctoral dissertation project probes the link between speakers' reported judgments and their sensitivity to structure in questions with and without ellipsis. The goal is to determine whether the same principles apply to dependencies involving ellipsis as those that do not, with the longer term goal of identifying the computational principles governing syntactic locality. More generally, the project addresses the consequences of mismatches between reported acceptability and subliminal sensitivity to structure in acceptability judgments.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.