Toddlers Acquire Verb Transitivity in Non-Social Overhearing Contexts

Acquiring word meanings is typically described as a social process involving live interaction and joint attention to the referent. However, the ability to learn meanings in non- social contexts could be useful in many overhearing situations, in which speech may not be child-directed, and learners may lack discourse and/or situational context. Is social context required to trigger toddlers’ abilities to map verbs to meaning? We address this question in the following experiment. Our results indicate that 2-year-olds can acquire a novel verb’s meaning even in socially impoverished contexts. This finding has implications for treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.American Philosophical Society (Franklin Research Grant

The effects of linguistic context on visual attention while learning novel verbs

The research reported here was supported by a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society and by NIH award number K01DC013306.http://www.cascadilla.com/bucld41toc.htmlPublished versio

Optional se constructions and flavours of applicatives in Spanish

Fabienne Martin's research is financially supported by DFG award AL 554/8-1 (Leibniz-Preis 2014) to Artemis Alexiadou and grant agreement No 856421 (LeibnizDream) from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.This paper addresses Spanish optional se constructions, which host a reflexive clitic serving as a non-selected argument in transitive structures (comer(se) la manzana 'eat.REFL the apple'). On the basis of new experimental data, we argue against the view that in such constructions se is similar to particles of exhaustivity such as up in English. We instead propose that se is a pronoun merged as an argument of a low applicative, conveying a locative relation 'in(x; y; s)' between the binder of the reflexive x and the nominative DP y ('x is in y in s'), or, for a subset of speakers, as an argument of a high applicative, introducing a (direct) experiencer of the verbal event. It is shown how this proposal accounts for the variability in the acceptance of optional se constructions across speakers and verb types as well as for the inferences of enriched or unaided agency, affectedness and counter-expectation that have been argued to be triggered by the se-variant of these constructions

Hindi and English Perfectives

It has been observed for several languages, including many South Asianlanguages, that some perfective forms do not entail completion of theevents they describe. We explore this phenomenon in the current study,contributing experimental and cross-linguistic perspectives. Wecompare perfective interpretations in Hindi, which has a perfectiveform that does not entail completion of its event, with perfectiveinterpretations in English, which does not have such a form. Using avariety of predicate types, we test the predictions of a semanticaccount of perfective interpretation, which predicts clear-cutdifferences between Hindi and English as well as clear patterns forcertain types of predicates, and a semantic account, which predicts amuch greater role for context as well as similar patterns acrosslanguages. Our results provide support for (a) the important ofcontext in perfective interpretation, and (b) considerable similarityin interpretation between Hindi and English. We hope the resultsindicate an important role for experimental investigation intosemantic phenomena

Eye-tracking measurements of language processing: developmental differences in children at high risk for ASD

To explore how being at high risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), based on having an older sibling diagnosed with ASD, affects word comprehension and language processing speed, 18-, 24- and 36-month-old children, at high and low risk for ASD were tested in a cross- sectional study, on an eye gaze measure of receptive language that measured how accurately and rapidly the children looked at named target images. There were no significant differences between the high risk ASD group and the low risk control group of 18- and 24-month-olds. However, 36-month-olds in the high risk for ASD group performed significantly worse on the accuracy measure, but not on the speed measure. We propose that the language processing efficiency of the high risk group is not compromised, but other vocabulary acquisition factors might have lead to the high risk 36-month-olds to comprehend significantly fewer nouns on our measure.K01 DC013306 - NIDCD NIH HHS; R01 DC010290 - NIDCD NIH HHS; K01DC013306 - NIDCD NIH HHS; R01 DC 10290 - NIDCD NIH HH

Real-time processing of event descriptions for partially- and fully-completed events: Evidence from the visual world paradigm

The current study investigated non-culminating accomplishments through an experimental lens. We used a well-established paradigm for studying real-time language processing using eye-tracking, the visual world paradigm. Our study was modeled after Altmann and Kamide’s (2007) investigation of processing of aspectual information contained in a perfect verb form (e.g., has eaten). We compared English-speaking adults’ interpretations of sentences like ‘The girl has eaten a cookie’ and ‘The girl was eating a cookie’ in the context of one of two visual scenes. In the Full Completion condition, the scene depicted two referents that were compatible with the predicate: one was compatible with the expected end state of the event (e.g., an empty plate), the other with an unrealized version of the event (e.g., an uneaten cookie). In the Partial Completion condition, the scene depicted a referent that was compatible with a partially-completed version of the event (e.g., part of a cookie on a plate) and an unrealized interpretation (e.g., an uneaten cookie). For verb forms in the perfect (e.g., has eaten) but not in the progressive, we found a difference between conditions; listeners preferred to look at the fully-affected referent in the Full Completion condition as compared to the partially-affected referent in the Partial Completion condition. We take the results as suggestive in favor of a pragmatic rather than semantic account of non-culmination interpretations in English

Preface

The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club, the graduate student organization of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pennsylvania. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from the NWAV conference and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium. The current PWPL series editors are Lukasz Abramowicz, Sudha Arunachalam, Maciej Baranowski, Lucas Champollion, Aaron Dinkin, Suzanne Evans Wagner, Michael Friesner, Jonathan Gress-Wright, Damien Hall, Uri Horesh, Ian Ross, Tatjana Scheffler, Sandhya Sundaresan, and Joshua Tauberer. This volume contains the proceedings of the 28th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, held from February 27 to 29, 2004, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia

Preface

The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club, the graduate student organization of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pennsylvania. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from the NWAV conference and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium. The current PWPL series editors are Lukasz Abramowicz, Sudha Arunachalam, Maciej Baranowski, Lucas Champollion, Aaron Dinkin, Suzanne Evans Wagner, Michael Friesner, Jonathan Gress-Wright, Damien Hall, Uri Horesh, Ian Ross, Tatjana Scheffler, Sandhya Sundaresan, and Joshua Tauberer. This volume contains the proceedings of the 28th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, held from February 27 to 29, 2004, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia

Fast mapping from argument structure alone

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Adjective forms and functions in British English child-directed speech

Abstract Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds’ exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives in child-directed speech (CDS); and (ii) investigate how features of the input might scaffold adjective acquisition. In our novel corpus of UK English, adjectives occurred more frequently in prenominal than in postnominal (predicative) syntactic frames, though postnominal frames were more frequent for less-familiar adjectives. They occurred much more frequently with a descriptive than a contrastive function, especially for less-familiar adjectives. Our findings present a partial mismatch between the forms of adjectives found in real-world CDS and those forms that have been shown to be more useful for learning. We discuss implications for models of adjective acquisition and for clinical practice