In the past ten years there has been an explosion of research on children's real time language comprehension. Young children, like adults, interpret language in a cascaded fashion, with processes at higher levels of linguistic analysis beginning before processes at lower levels are complete. Our work demonstrates that children's structural processing is smart is two ways. First, preschoolers use multiple sources of information to constrain syntactic parsing and converge on the most probable analysis of an unfolding utterance. Second, during language comprehension, children employ abstract mappings between syntax and semantics which can be primed. These mappings are of roughly the scope posited by linguistic theories of argument realization. Preschoolers and adults are different in some respects: children make worse use of context and have difficulty revising their interpretation in light of conflicting evidence. One is tempted to conclude that changes in language processing during the school years largely reflect domain-general cognitive changes in processing speed and cognitive control. I'll present preliminary work showing how these techniques and ideas can be used to study language processing in children with autism.

Verbs for psychological states have two distinct patterns of argument realization, presenting a challenge for theories of the syntax-semantics interface. 1. Subject-experiencer verbs: The candidate feared/enjoyed the grueling interview. 2. Object-experiencer verbs: The grueling interview frightened/pleased the candidate. If both types of verbs assign the same thematic roles (or have the same event structure), we would be forced to conclude that there is some degree of lexical arbitrariness in argument realization. Pesetsky (1995) has argued that these verb classes differ in their thematic roles: the object of a subject-experiencer verb is the target of the emotion, while the subject of an object-experiencer verb is the cause of the emotion. We have been exploring this hypothesis by: 1) collecting adult judgments on the conceptual properties of psychological predicates; 2) tracing the acquisition of these argument realization patterns; 3) testing how these patterns are extended to novel verbs; and 4) investigating how causal inferences are made (for both classes of verbs) during online processing.

The field of sentence processing is in the middle of a revolution in the way people view the relation between domain-general working memory processes and parsing routines, driven by novel experimental data (e.g. McElree, Foraker & Dyer 2003; Van Dyke 2007) and successful computational models (Lewis & Vasishth 2005). By tying together insights from psychology and computer science, researchers are now in a position to make specific claims about the computational character of the memory systems that drive parsing. In this talk, I will explore the contribution of linguistic structure to this line of research by presenting two case studies that examine the interaction between linguistic representation and working memory processes. In the first part of the talk, I examine the role of linguistic structure in gating memory access by examining the Mandarin Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji. Long-distance reflexives are an interesting test case because they require the use of structural information to resolve their antecedent, and can have potentially unbounded search spaces. I present speed-accuracy trade-off data that indicates the use of a hierarchically structured search process in resolving ziji's antecedent-anaphor dependency, along with data from event-related potentials that suggests possible algorithmic implementations of this search. In the second part of the talk, I examine a subclass of interference effects known as 'partial cue overlap' effects. By comparing negative polarity items (NPIs) and reflexives in English, I will argue that the locus of these effects is in processing errors that are particular to NPI dependencies, rather than an architectural fact about the parser. These results suggest that memory search strategies are sensitive to linguistic structure in surprising ways during online processing, a finding that in turn suggests new ways of exploring the interface between working memory and linguistic structure-building.

There are a growing a number of studies investigating "illusions of grammaticality" across different long-distance dependencies. Across this work, it appears that some dependencies (e.g. agreement and negative polarity items in Pearlmutter, Garnsey & Bock 1999; Drenhaus, Saddy & Frisch 2005) are highly susceptible to these illusions, while others appear to remain more grammatically faithful (e.g. reflexives in Clifton, Frazier & Deevy 1999; Sturt 2003). Due to a number of possible differences between the relevant studies, however, direct comparison is difficult to do. This session describes work in progress that directly compares reflexive and agreement dependencies to contrast the effect of these interference effects across dependency type. These dependencies provide a crucial test for the role of structure-independent feature-matching operations in processing, as they require retrieval of information at the same structural address. Initial results support the hypothesis that reflexives in general are not as susceptible to interference as agreement. This result, if true, provides further evidence that feature-matching is structurally constrained. However, proving that reflexives show no interference at all represents a difficult statistical problem; it requires the researcher to demonstrate the truth of the null hypothesis, which is not generally possible with traditional methods of hypothesis testing. In the current experiments, proving a null result carries significant theoretical purchase. In order to begin to make this argument, I will present an alternative Bayesian method of data analysis (Gallistel 2009) that allows inference about the existence of null effects.

Language acquisition has traditionally been conceived of as a matter of acquiring representations, such as words or syntactic rules. However, the young learner must also develop the ability to coordinate these representations in order to comprehend utterances in real-time. Do children consistently generate the same kinds of interpretations as adults do during comprehension? In cases where they do not, what is the nature of this developmental difference and what does it reveal about the connections between various linguistic representations? I will introduce three lines of work that investigate these issues by comparing patterns of sentence processing in five-year-olds and adults. Part 1 examines whether cascaded processing in word recognition is a basic architectural feature of the lexicon or one that is based on extensive linguistic experience. Part 2 examines how morphosyntactic markers which identify thematic roles influence interpretation of passive sentences in Mandarin-speaking children. Part 3 examines whether children can generate post-semantic inferences to capture a speaker’s intent. Altogether these results suggest that like adults, children exhibit incremental processing of language. However, unlike adults, children often fail to inhibit/revise initial interpretations. More broadly, this work highlights ways in which viewing language as a series of linked representations and comprehension as a process sheds light on the developmental trajectory of children’s interpretations.

I will describe on-going work that examines the division between lexical- and discourse-level processes in the interpretation of quantified and co-referential expressions. Part 1 examines how different forms of a quantified expression can highlight distinct sets within discourse. Participants’ responses in a passage-completion task and a self-paced reading task indicate that while positive forms like ‘some’ highlight the specified amount (the reference set), negative forms like ‘only some’ are ambiguous between this quantity and the remaining amount (the complement set). Part 2 tests whether this discourse ambiguity introduced in the negative quantified context had an immediate or delayed influence on co-referential processing using an eye-tracking while reading paradigm. At the lexical level, early eye-movements indicate immediate facilitation during reading of repeated anaphoric expressions. However, relative to this benchmark, the influence of context on the processing of referential ambiguity at the discourse level is much slower. Finally, part 3 examines how lexical and discourse processes are distinguished in the brain by comparing the interpretation of new and repeated expressions using event-related potentials. New expressions generate greater negativity during the 250ms-500ms window (N400) while infelicitous co-referential repeated expressions generate greater positivity during the 500ms-800ms window (P600). Altogether these results suggest a robust division between lexical and discourse-level processes during language comprehension.

Phonological contrasts make crucial reference to features, which are in turn signaled by various subphonemic cues. When the balance of cues changes sufficiently such that a previously intrinsic cue becomes extrinsic, this cue is said to have become phonologized (Hyman, 1976). A considerable body of recent work has focused on the extent to which recurrent patterns of phonologization should be attributed to channel effects (such as misperception) or to analytic biases (such as UG). While this approach highlights the potential differences (or lack thereof) in evidence favoring one mode of explanation over another, it is silent on the issue of precisely how these biases influence ongoing sound change. In this talk, I present a framework for investigating the relative contribution of bias in phonologization by modeling phonetic contrasts using Gaussian mixtures (Nearey & Hogan, 1986). I argue that phonologization is the result of an adaptive enhancement strategy, driven by loss of contrast precision, that optimizes both listener- and speaker-oriented constraints (Lindblom et al., 1995). Subphonemic cues are targeted and enhanced in a probabilistic fashion, proportional to their informativeness and the precision of the contrast they help to cue. I will present the details of this model and illustrate with an account of the ongoing phonologization of pitch in Seoul Korean (Kang & Guion, 2008).

According to phonetically-based phonological frameworks, functional constraints such as perceptual distinctiveness play a central role in shaping phonological behaviors (Boersma, 1998; Hayes et. al, 2004). This view is challenged by evidence of phonetically unnatural patterns active in synchronic phonological grammars (Anderson, 1981; Hyman, 2001). I consider arguments for the phonetic grounding of phonological features in Vietnamese tone, where it has been argued that, despite dialectal differences in the phonetics of tone production, phonetically grounded tone features are shared across dialects (Pham, 2001, 2003). From the results of a cross-dialectal perception study, I argue that the features relevant for the perception of tones no longer correspond to their phonologically active counterparts in any straightforward way, either within or between dialects. This result is discussed in terms of its implication for the notion of phonetically grounded phonological constraints, as well as for the relationship between subphonemic and categorical levels of linguistic structure.

In recent years, there have been a number of efforts to combine advanced theoretical work in comparative syntax with the well-established quantitative approach of sociolinguistics in order to develop a theoretically informed program of research into morphosyntactic variation with precise quantitative hypotheses and reproducible results. The construction of large, diachronic parsed corpora (Kroch and Taylor, 2000a; Kroch et al., 2004) has made this goal much more achievable by providing a body of data on which different researchers can test predictions about syntactic variation and change, and where they can challenge each other’s results directly by referring to the same set of raw obervations (cf. repeated studies of the OV-to-VO change in early English: Pintzuk, 1991; Kroch and Taylor, 2000b; Haeberli, 2002; Trips, 2002; Pintzuk and Taylor, 2004; Wallenberg, 2009). However, this emerging field has suffered from the lack of a robust comparative dimension, simply because comparable parsed diachronic corpora have not been available for many languages other than English. Our project is one step in the direction of improving the situation. In this talk we present an ongoing project that complements the precise and quantitative approach to morphosyntactic change which was first made possible by the construction of diachronic treebanks of English. Our project involves annotating a substantial amount of text from every century of written Icelandic with a full phrase structure parse, thus making it possible to study in detail the similarities and differences of the history of English and Icelandic syntax. Some of the changes, such as the change from OV to VO word order, were very similar, while others, such as the loss of morphological case in English, have increased the typological difference between the languages. Having a diachronic treebank of each language allows us to study the nature of the changes in detail, as well as the interface between different components of the grammar as evidenced by the statistical relationships between different changes. While our project is still in its early stages we present some preliminary results from our corpus on the position of possessives and the structure of the DP, passives, and phrase structure change over time. These results are based on Icelandic data from the 12th century and the 19th century, and a comparison between our corpus and data from the much larger diachronic English corpora.

We try to synthesize these hypotheses: (i) There is an isomorphy between the phonological and semantic scopes of focus. (ii) In situ WH phrases in Japanese-type languages are literally focused. (iii) Alternative semantics for WH and ordinary F are covered by a single system of semantic values.

Germanic and Romance languages differ in how prosody is affected by information structure. Ladd (2008), e.g., observes contrasts between English and Italian that reveal differences in how argument structure and information structure affect prosody. These differences seem to generalize to other Romance and Germanic languages (see Swerts et al. 2002, Swerts 2007 for experimental evidence on Dutch, Italian, and Romanian). Using experimental evidence (mainly from English and French), this talk explores the semantic, syntactic, and phonological underpinnings of the prosodic differences. The observed patterns suggest a connection between seemingly unrelated facts, e.g., the stresslessness of indefinite pronouns such as 'something' and contrastive focus; they reveal that both semantic and phonological givenness play a role in focus marking, as do constraints on syntactic movement; they cast doubt on claims of a universal nuclear stress (Cinque 1993); and finally, they have repercussions in sometimes unexpected ways, e.g., they influence what types of rhyme are considered artistic in poetry.

In this talk I propose a unified approach to two long-standing ellipsis-related conundrums: (1) the fact that the existing literature on ellipsis is highly taxonomical and construction-oriented; and (2) the fact that ellipsis appears to show great variation cross-linguistically. Based on the approach put forth in Van Craenenbroeck & Lipták (2005, 2006, 2009) I argue that a cross-linguistically refined theory of ellipsis can tackle both issues at once. The analysis is then further refined by incorporating Thoms' (2010) movement theory of ellipsis licensing and by expanding the approach to other types of ellipsis.