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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.