Morphological Analysis on the Language Acquisition

The paper highlights the importance of Morphology in Linguistics and in the acquisition of new language. It outlines various elements forming the domain of morphology in brief and its role in learning of a new language in detail. Language acquisition is an interesting topic studied by most linguists from the time of inception of language learning as a cognitive science. The topic is still frequently studied by linguistic enthusiasts especially through the lens of morphological analysis. It is a secondary research paper

Ad-hoc implicature in preschool children

Abstract If a speaker tells us that "some guests were late to the party," we typically infer that not all were. Implicatures, in which an ambiguous statement ("some and possibly all") is strengthened pragmatically (to "some and not all"), are a paradigm case of pragmatic reasoning. Inferences of this sort are difficult for young children, but recent work suggests that this mismatch may stem from issues in understanding the relationship between lexical items like "some" and "all," rather than broader pragmatic deficits. We tested children's ability to make non-quantificational pragmatic inferences by constructing contextually-derived "ad-hoc" implicatures, using sets of pictures with contrasting features. We found that four-year-olds and some three-year-olds were able to make implicatures successfully using these displays. Hence, apparent failures in scalar implicature are likely due to difficulties specific to the constructions and tasks used in previous work; these difficulties may have masked aspects of children's underlying pragmatic competence

Meaning as mentalization

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker’s intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization—the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners—already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners

A Study of the Comprehension of Equative Tautologies in Adults and Children

The main objective of this paper is to examine the interpretation of so-called "equative tautologies" in adults and children. An experiment designed to assess the capacity of adults and children ages 7-9 to calculate implicature from tautologies is discussed. The prediction of the "Radical Semantic" account of tautologies (Wierzbicka 1987, Gibbs & McCarrell 1990) that human referent tautologies (e.g. "a plumber is a plumber") are easier to interpret than concrete referent tautologies (e.g. "a snack is a snack") was not confirmed by data from 23 adult subjects. Furthermore, the child data suggest that children do not interpret tautologies in an adult-like way. When presented with tautological statements, 7-year-olds tended to rely on their own preferences and knowledge of others' preferences rather than computing a conversational implicature as adults do, but this tendency decreased with age. Several explanations are provided to explain the poor performance of children compared to adults in the experiment, with suggestions for future work on the comprehension of tautologies.Master of Art

Meaning as mentalization

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker’s intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization—the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners—already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners

THE ROLE OF NON-LINGUISTIC COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT AND LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC MORPHOLOGICAL PROPERTIES IN THE FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF DEMONSTRATIVES

This dissertation investigates children’s comprehension of demonstratives, such as this and that in English. As deictic spatial expressions, the interpretation of demonstratives is context-dependent: a proximal demonstrative (e.g., this) picks out the entity near the speaker, while a distal demonstrative (e.g., that) picks out the entity apart from the speaker; crucially, the entity-speaker distance is determined by the speaker’s perspective, which varies across contexts. Studies have shown that children tend to be non-adult-like when comprehending demonstratives uttered by a speaker who has a different perspective from their own (e.g., Clark & Sengul, 1978; Zhao, 2007). To better understand children’s comprehension of demonstratives, this dissertation explores (i) the cognitive factors which might hinder children’s adult-like knowledge, and (ii) the language-specific factors which might improve children’s demonstrative comprehension. This dissertation first discusses Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Function (EF) and how the development of each may hinder children’s comprehension of demonstratives. Successful comprehension of demonstratives requires the listener to incorporate the speaker’s perspective, in which cognitive abilities may play a role. It has been suggested that children’s non-adult-like demonstratives may be related to their still-developing ToM (de Villiers, 2007) and EF (Nilsen & Graham, 2012). Two experiments directly tested this hypothesis with English-speaking and Chinese-speaking children, respectively. Both experiments utilized two demonstrative comprehension linguistic tasks, and two cognitive tasks measuring ToM and EF, respectively. The results from both experiments suggest that children’s successful comprehension of demonstratives may be related to their ToM development, but not EF. This dissertation then examines whether a language-specific morphological representation of demonstratives may interact with children’s comprehension in a way that prevents them from committing non-adult-like comprehension. Demonstratives in Mandarin Chinese are of particular interest because they typically occur with classifiers. Classifiers are semantically dependent on their associated referents; interestingly, classifiers are known to facilitate adults’ sentence processing (e.g., Hsu, 2006; Wu, Kaiser, & Andersen, 2009). Thus, this dissertation examined whether and to what extent the classifier may improve Chinese-speaking children’s demonstrative comprehension. Results reveal that the classifier semantics improves children’s demonstrative comprehension, particularly when the classifier semantics itself is sufficient to identify the referent. In sum, the results of the studies discussed in this dissertation suggest that both cognitive factors and language-specific factors play an important role in children’s demonstrative comprehension

Making Worlds Accessible. Essays in Honor of Angelika Kratzer

Every linguist knows how colossal Angelika’s impact on our field is. Hearing aboutthis would not be informative for anybody who might (virtually) pick up this volume, including Angelika herself. So, instead of writing about, say, Angelika’s crucial role in the development of our understanding of modality, we will write about what Angelika means to us, as a teacher, advisor, mentor, colleague, and friend. We know that these words will resonate with many of you (Angelika has meant so much to so many people). We just get to be the lucky ones to tell Angelika publicly.https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ak_festsite_schrift/1000/thumbnail.jp

Finding modal force

This dissertation investigates when and how children figure out the force of modals, that is, when and how they learn that can/might express possibility, whereas must/have to express necessity. Learning modal force raises a logical “Subset Problem”: given that necessity entails possibility, what prevents learners from hypothesizing possibility meanings for necessity modals? Three main solutions to other Subset Problems have been proposed in the literature. The first is a bias towards strong (here, necessity) meanings, in the spirit of Berwick (1985). The second is a reliance on downward-entailing environments, which reverse patterns of entailment (Gualmini & Schwarz, 2009). The third is a reliance on pragmatic situational cues stemming from the conversational context in which modals are used (Dieuleveut et al., 2019). This dissertation assesses the viability of each, by examining the modals used in speech to and by 2-year-old English children, through a combination of corpus studies and experiments testing the guessability of modal force based on their context of use. I show that negative and other downward-entailing contexts are rare with necessity modals, making them impractical on their own. However, the conversational context in which modals are used in speech to children is highly informative about both forces. Thus, if learners are sensitive to these conversational cues, they, in principle, do not need to rely either on a necessity bias nor on negative environments to solve the Subset Problem. Turning to children’s own productions, I show that children master possibility modals very early: by age 2, they use them productively, and in an adult-like way. However, they struggle with necessity modals: they use them less frequently, and not in an adult-like way. Their modal uses show no evidence for a necessity bias. To assess how children actually figure out modal force, and which of the available cues children use to figure out modal force, I then examine which aspects of children’s input best predict their mastery of modals. Preliminary results suggest that negation is predictive of children’s early success with necessity modals, and that frequency of modal talk, but not of particular lexemes, also contributes to their early success