I consider two analyses of the syntax-semantics of cross-categorial constructions with more. The first view (held in the literature) posits that more is interpreted as a degree quantifier fed degrees by a heterogeneous collection of measure functions. The second view (the one I propose) interprets more as a two-place relation between degrees, uniformly provided by a single measure function MUCH. A number of empirical and theoretical arguments are leveled to distinguish these views. I show ...

Recent studies show that by 11 months, language experience constrains infants¹ detection of audio-visual correspondences in non-native speech (Pons et al., 2009; Best et al., 2010, 2011). But what is it that they have learned about native AV relations, and how does it bias their responses to non-native speech? An array of theoretical views offer differing hypotheses. The Learned Association view posits that AV associations require experience to develop, i.e., should emerge in older ...

Development of medical techniques with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has increased our knowledge of voice production mechanisms in speech and singing. Our experience with high-resolution imaging techniques has also provided us new insights into physiological and acoustic aspects of voice production process. Physiologically, the larynx is under the control of the surrounding motor apparatus, and changes in voice fundamental frequency is dependent not only on the internal laryngeal functions but also on the external mechanisms ...

When children learn pronouns, they ultimately must learn how to categorize them. Reflexives such as “himself” must have their antecedent in their local domain (roughly, within the same clause): in a sentence such as "Bill said that John likes himself", the antecedent of "himself" must be "John" and cannot be "Bill" (Principle A). Non-reflexives such as "him" must not have their antecedents in their local domain: in a sentence such as "Bill said that John ...

Presuppositions can produce what come across as inferential effects. An example is the following three-sentence discourse:

(1) ‘I gave the workers a generous tip. One thanked me. The other left without saying a word.’ (see [1])

This discourse seems to entail that the number of workers referred to in the first sentence was 2. This effect is quite systematic, as can be observed by varying the subject phrases of the second and third sentence of ...

Brad and Dave will discuss and seek input on some thoughts they've been working on concerning the nature of movement for Case/EPP reasons.

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the Frames study for this semester.

Mayfest is a workshop that brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to discuss fundamental issues in linguistics. Over the course of two days, participants engage in talks and discussion sessions to stimulate new insights and collaboration. This year's workshop will center on the role of computational modeling in developing theories of human language.

The Greeks used the concept, techne, to refer to crafts and skills that were associated with creation of reliably superior products. Later on this concept was extended to include categories of less reliable performance in law and medicine. Subsequent efforts to develop expertise promoted extended experience, acquisition of knowledge, general ability (talent) and advanced schooling. Consistent with this general view it is often assumed that 10 years of professional experience changes people into experts. Recent ...

A key property of natural language is its ability to establish relationships between non-adjacent items in a sentence. For example, a verb must agree with its subject, though the two items may be separated by several words or phrases, as in The student(s) in the IGERT program eat(s) lunch every Thursday. Constructing these linguistic relations requires rapid access to the products of past analyses to integrate incoming material into a developing representation of ...

Practice job talk

Much work has documented children's comprehension difficulties with verbs of cognitive state--e.g. "think", "believe", "realize", "want", "say", etc. Adult-like representations of desire and communication verbs like "want" and "say" and belief state verbs like "think" do not appear to be present until 3 and 4 years of age, respectively (de Villiers 2005). One factor in this late-learning may be the nature of the evidence that children have at their disposal for learning these ...

Developmental prosopagnosia is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by severe face recognition deficits in the presence of intact low-level vision and intellect. The condition provides a unique window to investigate a range of issues in face processing. In my talk, I'll discuss studies investigating its cognitive, neural, and genetic basis.

We are discussing David Lewis' "General Semantics", 1970.

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the Puffin study for this semester.

In this talk I will review a variety of roles of inhibitory interactions and mechanisms in the auditory cortex. Receptive field differences exist between excitatory and inhibitory neurons that influence their mutual interactions. Excitatory and inhibitory neurons have distinct spatial pattern in relation to cortical functional organization. The development and plasticity of cortical receptive fields is strongly influenced by inhibitory influences and modulations. Finally, acute or chronic manipulations of inhibitory networks can lead to a ...

In this talk I explore how the semantic feature of animacy can help guide children's learning of certain abstract predicates, and lead them to figure out the syntactic structures associated with these predicates. More specifically, I show that encountering an inanimate subject in a biclausal structure provides a cue that the subject is displaced with respect to its theta-marked position. In turn, this tells the learner that the main predicate is what I'll ...

Categories in perception and classification exists in many domains, including artificial shape perception, color discrimination, and lexical categories of words. Sound perception is no different, and various types of sounds have been explored for the type of categoricity effects they elicit. When we consider two classic cases of Stop Consonants and Vowels, they differ in the extend to which they are perceived categorically. Categorical perception has been proposed for the very categorical stop consonants, while ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the 3rdMan study for this semester.

Early life experience potently shapes brain function and adult behavior. The biological bases underlying these windows of plasticity are increasingly being resolved in the developing mouse neocortex. This talk will cover core concepts of "critical periods" across sensory systems (visual, auditory, cross-modal). Pioneering the use of a molecular/genetic approach, we revealed that specific GABA circuits orchestrate the functional and structural rewiring of neural networks during sensory cortical development. Consequently, shifting excitatory-inhibitory (E-I) circuit balance ...

Many of you are familiar with the work that Wing Yee has presented in this area before -- on Friday she will be talking about possible future developments of the work, some of which she plans to run in China in the near future.

How does human language comprehension achieve its hallmark ability to construct an unbounded range of compositional meanings from a finite (though large) set of individual words? My lab uses event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neuro-cognitive processes serving on-line sentence comprehension. ERPs provide sensitivity to distinct neural processes with millisecond-level temporal resolution and a limited ability to resolve neuroanatomical sources. Recent findings in our lab and others’ indicate that semantic knowledge can drive combinatory ...

The problem of presupposition projection is the problem of relating the presuppositions of complex sentences to the presuppositions of their parts, in an application of the general principle of semantic compositionality. It has been agreed, ever since Karttunen's papers on the subject in the 1970s, that sentences do inherit the presuppositions of their parts, i.e. that presuppositions do project, but under certain quite complex conditions. But what is the form of the projection ...

[Tydings Hall is the 3rd building to the west of MMH, after Woods and Key.]

Readers and listeners assign interpretations to text and speech moment-by-moment as soon as they perceive new input, rather than waiting until sentences unfold entirely to discern who is doing what to whom. Although efficient, processing language ‘on-the-fly’ can be costly: early interpretations sometimes turn out wrong when late-arriving input conflicts with one’s developing analysis. In this talk, I will ...

In this talk, I provide a new explanation for the well-known, cross-linguistically frequent phenomenon whereby anticausatives and reflexives are (or can be) expressed with the same morphology. I focus specifically on the role of the -st morpheme in the Icelandic sentences in (1) and (2).

(1) Rúðan splundraðist.
window.the shattered-ST
'The window shattered.' (anticausative)

(2) Bjartur tróðst gegnum mannþröngina.
Bjartur squeezed-ST through crowd.the
'Bjartur squeezed (himself) through the crowd.' (figure reflexive)

We are discussing Katz & Fodor 1963, "The Structure of a Semantic Theory".

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the InstWM study for this semester.

Humans may be unique among animals in our social motivations, for example in the extent to which we identify with and wish to align ourselves with our fellow group members. I show here that these social motivations are already present in infancy and early childhood. I present a series of studies on imitation, affiliation, and identification, which highlight young children’s connections with their social group and document their early preferential treatment of in- vs ...

While the aim of language acquisition research is to describe the nature of the child's developing grammar, we face a challenge in that the grammar itself is not visible to us- we must rely on observable behavior. And further, children's behavior is not directly indicative of their grammatical knowledge, in two important ways. First, behavior is inherently a function of both a child's grammatical knowledge and the deployment processes required to implement ...

Landau (2000, 2004) draws a distinction between P(artial) C(ontrol) and E(xhaustive) C(ontrol): whereas PC predicates like hope admit a subset relation between the controller and controllee, EC predicates like try do not. (e.g., Kim hoped to gather at noon. [controllee = Kim and contextually salient others] vs. *Kim tried to gather at noon.) This talk explores the consequences of Cinque’s (2006) suggestion that whereas PC instantiates ‘true’ biclausal control, EC ...

In Hindi-Urdu, T(ense) can agree with non-overtly case-marked subjects or objects. Despite being controlled by the same head and being sensitive to the same morphological properties of the agreement target, agreement inside conjunction structures reveals differences between subjects and objects: agreement with objects is sensitive to linear proximity, while agreement with subjects is not. This difference shows itself in two sets of conjunction structures: agreement with conjoined subjects and objects, and agreement in Right ...

Bradley Larson will present work that will be presented later this month at the Chicago Linguistic Society's annual meeting.

Results from a study by Huang et al. (under review) suggest that preschoolers rely on a word's reference or semantic content when deciding whether to make early thematic role assignments in online processing. In this language acquisition lab meeting, we will discuss the design of a new study looking at how the referential and/or featural content of a word affects children's predictive assignment of thematic roles.

The first annual PHLINC, or PHLING Colloquium, will bring together young researchers working on events in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. We aim to relate the discussion of events in these fields, bringing into conversation the work in ontology, logic, semantics, and perception. We will also have two invited speakers: Achille Varzi of Columbia University, and Paul Pietroski of the University of Maryland.

The problem of segmenting continuous speech is a great challenge for native and nonnative (L2) listeners alike. Speech signal, unlike the presence of gaps in written text, often do not contain breaks at word edges. Even when breaks occur in the form of pauses, they do not coincide with perceived word boundaries. Listeners can solve the segmentation problem by utilizing a variety of cues including lexical, acoustic, and prosodic cues. Language typology may influence the ...

Philosophy Colloquium
Robert Hanna, University of Colorado at Boulder

Abstract

As I will understand it, the analytic-synthetic distinction (or the A-S distinction for short) is the categorically sharp contrast between

1. truth in virtue of conceptual content, always taken together with some things in the world beyond conceptual content, although never in virtue of those worldly things (=analytic truth), and

2. truth in virtue of things in the world beyond conceptual content, always taken together with some ...

[This is Taliaferro Hall.]

Oral Examination for the Degree of PhD in Philosophy

This research proposes a unified approach to the semantics of the so-called bare nominals, which include proper names (e.g., 'Mary'), mass and plural terms (e.g., 'water', 'cats'), and articleless noun phrases in Japanese. I argue that bare nominals themselves are monadic predicates applicable to more than one particular, but they can constitute complex referential phrases when located within an appropriate ...

We are continuing on a whirlwind tour of "the classics", so reading and discussing Dowty's 1989 paper, "On the semantic content of the notion of 'thematic role'" this week.

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the MOST study for this semester, and then discussing extending Annie's model from our Friday discussion to this data.

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the Snail/Dragon study for this semester.

ABSTRACT

Visual search problems are everywhere (especially if you happen to study visual search). First, I will give a rationale for why we have to search at all. Why isn’t “Where’s Waldo” just “There’s Waldo”. Then I will turn to research inspired by three real world search tasks.

1) Hybrid search: How long would it take you to determine that none of your 1000 Facebook friends were in this picture of 100 ...

The notion of words is obscure and yet is supposedly one of the basic notions in theory of linguistics. When we ask what words are, we cannot get a definite answer like that a chemist could provide for the question “what is water”. We talk about words in various contexts of linguistic theories: in semantics we ask questions like “what does the word ‘definite’ mean?”, in acquisition we say the baby learned ten new words ...

Practice talk for CUNY.

We show that prenominal possessors block a "relative" interpretation of superlatives crosslinguistically. That is, whereas "Ty knows the tallest friends of Mary's" can mean that Ty knows the friends of Mary's that are tallest out of all of Mary's friends OR the group of Mary's friends that Ty knows is taller than any other group, "Ty knows Mary's tallest friends" is only compatible with the former interpretation (the "absolute" reading ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the Resultative study for this semester.

More than thirty years of research has examined “theory of mind” in non-human animals, human infants, children and adults, and human brains. This work has led to many insights, but, if anything, the object of study has become less clear as the weight of evidence has increased. By turns, researchers conceptualise “theory of mind” as a set of concepts, a collection of cognitive processes, and an individual difference variable. I shall argue that these conceptions ...

Although there is substantive evidence of implicit learning (without intention or awareness) of form to form mappings in cognitive psychology, findings in the field of second language acquisition have been inconclusive. This study will investigate the possibility of adults acquiring a second language morphosyntactic rule implicitly. For the experiment, 75 adult native speakers of English without formal training in language sciences will be randomly assigned to one of three groups of 25, (two experimental and ...

Join us in welcoming in prospective graduate students for the freshman class of 2012. Students will begin to arrive on Thursday March 8. On Friday March 9 there will be several events in the department, followed by a party in the evening.

Determiner sharing and non-constituent coordination are two relatively old, but relatively uninvestigated phenomena, especially within mainstream gen- erative syntax. The peculiarity of both phenomena has led to a number of interesting, but not entirely satisfactory, accounts; to date, no real account of determiner sharing exists, and the best accounts of non-constituent coor- dination come from the categorial theories. In this paper I will attempt to give a account of both that relies on nothing more ...

[Practice talk for GLOW]

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at Julie's new study this semester.

Perhaps one of the most puzzling areas in syntax-semantics research concerns how sentences with comparative "more" are constructed and interpreted. I present a number of novel observations and generalizations, with an eye to understanding the roles of the lexicon and syntax in constraining the distribution of so-called "monotonic" versus "non-monotonic" scales. I consider how existing theories might be extended to (minimally) describe the new data, and propose an alternative aimed at better explaining it.

Object agreement is the realization of valued phi features on v. Clitic doubling is the movement of a D head into the verbal inflectional complex. In principle, these two phenomena are distinct, but in practice it can be difficult to determine whether a given morpheme is the reflex of object agreement or a moved clitic. In this talk, I will take up the issue for the Amharic (Ethiosemitic) object marker, a morpheme attached to verbs ...

We will be practicing for an upcoming Glow talk. Your feedback is very welcome!

An abundance of evidence (much of it from research at UMD) suggests that sentence comprehension processes respect grammatical constraints in real time. That is, every stage of processing seems to be subject to the same constraints that we see in offline judgments. However, this surface-level similarity does not entail that there is a transparent mapping between the representations or computations invoked at the grammatical and algorithmic levels. For example, in a grammatical theory, a dependency ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, discussing the PRC study for this semester.

Language Acquisition lab meeting, reviewing a practice talk for the GURT conference

The production and the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences is impaired in aphasia. For example, both Wh-movement sentences (such as object-extracted relative clauses) and NP-movement sentences (such as passives) elicit chance performance by adults with aphasia in off-line comprehension tasks like sentence-picture matching. However, it remains unclear how exactly impaired adults try (and often fail) to comprehend such sentences in real time. This talk reviews evidence from a series of studies examining the real-time comprehension ...

In recent years a number of problems in the brain and cognitive sciences have been addressed through statistical approaches, hypothesizing that humans and animals learn or adapt to their perceptual environments by tuning themselves to the statistics of incoming stimulation. Professor Newport will present her work on statistical language learning, showing that infants, young children, and adults can compute, online and with remarkable speed, how consistently sounds co-occur, how frequently words occur in similar contexts ...

The acquisition of attitude verbs has been a topic of interest to researchers in linguistics and psychology for many years. Attitude verbs are a subclass of verbs we use to talk about the contents of other people’s minds. There is a well-documented gap between two particular subclasses of attitude verbs: belief verbs and desire verbs. Many different studies have shown that children acquire the language of desire much sooner than that of belief. This ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the WH study for this semester.

The Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning brings together over 60 faculty and students from Washington to New York to share and develop new work in semantics and pragmatics, from theoretical, experimental, and philosophical perspectives. The University of Maryland hosts the Second MACSIM on Saturday, 18 February 2012, featuring Professor Roger Schwarzschild of Rutgers University as an invited speaker.

I argue that compositionality (in the sense of homomorphic interpretation) is compatible with radical and pervasive contextual effects on interpretation. Apparent problems with this claim lose their force if we are careful in distinguishing the question of how a grammar assigns interpretations from the question of how people figure out which interpretations the grammar assigns. I demonstrate, using a simple example, that this latter task must sometimes be done not by computing a derivation defined ...

I introduce hierarchical Bayesian modelling and illustrate its relation to traditional ideas in language acquisition. I show how a Bayesian model of phoneme learning can be constructed to solve the problem of learning in the presence of phonetic interference from adjacent segments or speaker-specific variability. It outperforms comparable models based on traditional ideas and is robust to various kinds of (interesting) noise. I then describe an experiment (currently running) which tests the predictions of this ...

We use experimental methodology to demonstrate from two separate domains (learning segmental phonology in Turkish and learning inflectional morphology in Romance) that not every pattern in a language, even if statistically robust or exceptionless, is actually learned by speakers: unnatural patterns are underlearned, suggesting that humans may bring formal and substantive biases to the task of forming grammatical generalisations.

We are discussing Gillian Ramchand's 2005 paper, "Post-Davidsonianism".

It is generally assumed that all displaced wh-elements have a syntactic dependency with a gap somewhere in the sentence. We propose that in coordinated wh-questions like "What and when did John eat?", only the right-conjoined wh-word ("when") participates in a standard wh-dependency. The left-conjoined wh-word ("what") is base-generated in its overt position and has no syntactic relationship with the verb. The dependency is established only at the semantic level. We present the results of two ...

Samoan is a Polynesian language with an ergative case marking system. While ergative and oblique case are marked segmentally, the absolutive case has been thought to be unmarked. I will present fieldwork data in Samoan supporting the hypothesis that absolutive case is marked by a lexical high tone, although this is not necessarily a one-to-one mapping, since high tones also mark other grammatical structures, as well as prosodic boundaries. I will discuss implications of this ...

Increasingly many findings suggest that the N400, long thought to reflect semantic processing, can be completely ‘blind’ to blatant semantic anomalies. For example, most studies of ‘role-reversed’ sentences such as “The fox.SUBJ the poacher.OBJ hunted” in verb-final constructions show that the verb elicits no N400 effect relative to the canonical word order control, despite the obvious anomaly. This kind of ‘dumb’ N400 has been taken to reflect a semantic illusion, and it contrasts ...

We will meet to discuss chapters 1 & 2 of Ann Bunger's (2006) dissertation, "How We Learn to Talk About Events: Linguistic and Conceptual Constraints on Verb Learning".

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at M.I.T., will be visiting the University of Maryland for two days, January 26-27, 2012, as a part of the Humanities Dean's Lecture Series.

On the evening of Friday January 27 there will be a general talk on political issues at the Gildenhorn Recital Hall in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at M.I.T., will be visiting the University of Maryland for two days, January 26-27, 2012, as a part of the Humanities Dean's Lecture Series.

On the morning of Friday January 27th Professor Chomsky is giving a specialist talk on linguistic theory.

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at M.I.T., will be visiting the University of Maryland for two days, January 26-27, 2012, as a part of the Humanities Dean's Lecture Series.

On the 26th, at 4:30pm, he will give a general talk on Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the Colony Ballroom in the Stamp Student Union.

Winter Storm is a FREE 2-week intensive training session covering material relevant to any researcher who works with language. It takes place on campus Monday through Friday from 10am - 5pm from January 9-15 and 17-20. Daily activities include morning seminars on programming and statistical processing in the R, guest speaker lunch presentations, reading groups, and professional development presentations in the afternoons.

All are welcome!

Cybelle will be practicing her talk, "Intonational cues to interrogative intent in African American Vernacular English", and Alexis will practicing hers, "When to quantify: syntactic cues in the acquisition of novel superlatives".

This week, we are discussing Liverence & Scholl, "Discrete Events as Units of Perceived Time", as well as planning for PHLINC in the spring.

Maryland folks will be visiting the NSF Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) at Gallaudet University. This fall, they also have a brand new Brain and Language Lab (BL2) with fNIRS equipment. UMD students and faculty will have the chance to meet members of Gallaudet's departments of linguistics; psychology; hearing, speech, and language sciences; and interpretation.

This event is coordinated by Clifton Langdon, a Ph.D. student in linguistics ...

Joint work with Ilaria Frana, University of Goettingen

Heim (1979) famously observed that sentences like (1) are ambiguous:

(1) Miles knows the price that Clara knows.
    = Miles knows what the price of the iPhone is, and Clara does too. ("what value"/A reading.)
    = Miles knows which product Clara knows the price of. ("which concept"/B reading.)

Understanding this ambiguity and its consequences have been a central to understanding "concealed questions" and question-embedding verbs in general ...

Infants have been shown to develop expectations about the link between a word’s grammatical category and its likely meaning during the 2nd year of life (Waxman & Markow, 1995; Waxman & Booth, 2001), and their knowledge that verbs label event categories are acquired by 21‐months (Bernal et al, 2007). However, given previous studies that have shown infants’ sensitivity to the distributional features of the verb category by 15‐months (Peterson, 2006; Mintz, 2006), it is ...

My research has focused on the relationship between perception, cognition, and action control. It is commonly understood that we gather information from the environment and use it to intelligently guide our behaviors. My work has suggested that the control flows in the opposite direction as well; when we choose to engage in a particular type of behavior, our perceptual and cognitive systems change, in fundamental ways, to better mediate those actions. As the response demands ...

[Note on the location: the Benjamin Building is at the north end of the plaza it shares with Tawes and the Art-Sociology building, up the hill behind McKeldin, 700 yards from Marie Mount Hall.]

Adults, under ideal conditions (i.e., given unlimited time), evaluate which of two sets is "most" by counting up the objects in each and determining which has the higher count. So, does this mean that one must be able to count in order to understand "most"? Halberda et al 2008 set out to answer this question, and found that the answer is "no": some kids that can't count and even some that can evaluate ...

Researchers have argued that sound change may obtain when deviant percepts due to listeners' under-normalization for variation in speech become seeds for new perceptual and production norms (Ohala, 1993; Blevins, 2004). How deviant percepts accumulate in a systematic fashion to give rise to stable variation remains a vexing question. This study explores how variation in socio-cognitive processing may contribute to the emergence and propagation of sound change, showing that variations in several individual-difference cognitive dimensions ...

To celebrate the end of the semester, we will be having a DEBATE. Topic: "Retrieval in parsing anaphora: interference (never) helps"

In the blue corner: Shevaun Lewis & Wing Yee Chow. A fearsome pairing, they have been preparing by co-teaching a psycholinguistics seminar. They can complete an eye-tracking experiment in two days, and cook Thanksgiving dinner for 50 people even faster. Few dare to challenge them.

In the red corner: Dan Parker & Sol Lago. The young ...

[Computational Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting] Role-reversed sentences (e.g., The thief arrested the cop) describe thematic relations that are unexpected given our world knowledge. I will review existing works that model how our knowledge (prior belief) affects how we process bottom-up information, and propose a way to extend existing models to study the processing of role-reversed sentences.

A growing literature shows that children are highly sensitive to statistical features of their linguistic input (Saffran et al 1996; Gomez & Gerken 2000). This literature assumes that children can reliably encode all of the information available in this input, contrasting with the observation that children are sometimes sensitive to features of their language out of proportion with their statistical reliability. This contrast highlights the difference between the input, the linguistic information available in the environment ...

This thesis will be examining reflexive pronouns that can take antecedents outside of their immediate clause. I argue that such pronouns are related to their antecedents by sisterhood, followed by movement of the antecedent.

We will discuss Loucks and Pederson's "Linguistic and non-linguistic categorization of complex motion events", from the book Event Representations in Language and Cognition, Cambridge UP.

Syntax Lab

Third of three Baggett Lectures

The Shoemaker Building is 250 yards southwest of Marie Mount Hall, at the western edge of Parking Lot Y.

Abstract

How does a community create and maintain a language? And how does an individual learn a language? These are both hard problems; but the goal of this lecture will be to persuade you that they are connected in ways that can make them easier to solve together than separately. I ...

Wing Yee Chow will talk about "The Smart N400, and the Dumb N400", and about how she can turn one into the other.

There are two main sources of variability in natural languages: sociolinguistic (probabilistic) variability and parametric variation. Although sociolinguistic variation has long been recognized as an integral part of the linguistic system, its impact on the acquisition of grammar has barely been explored. We present experimental data from Chilean Spanish (ChS) and Brazilian Portuguese (BrP), two languages in which there is significant sociolinguistic variation in the production of plural morphology but which also differ parametrically in ...

Speakers are usually quite accurate and fluent when speaking, but we all make errors. While these speech errors have been a rich source of data on the mechanisms of language production, less is known about the consequences of these errors for our listeners. This is largely because most research on comprehension focuses on "ideal delivery" utterances; that is, comprehension of language that is error- and disfluency-free. I will discuss some work-in-progress investigating what happens to ...

Second of three Baggett Lectures

The Shoemaker Building is 250 yards southwest of Marie Mount Hall, at the western edge of Parking Lot Y.

Abstract

Three developments are creating an extraordinary range of near-term opportunities. First, algorithms for many kinds of automatic speech and language analysis have passed the threshold of usability; second, more and more of our personal, social, and economic life flows through digital networks that are subject to computational analysis; and third ...

First of three Baggett Lectures

Directions to Marie Mount Hall.

Abstract

In the preface to Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw noted that “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Americans, Australians, and Canadians are full partners today in the network of negativity; and writing is at least as likely as speech to provoke the haters, who are often strongly motivated to share their reactions ...

Professor Mark Liberman (Christopher H. Browne Disinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania) will be giving a series of three lectures, generously supported by Dave Baggett:

1. The Linguistic Culture Wars

   November 16, 4-6pm, Maryland Room, Marie Mount Hall

2. The Coming Golden Age of Speech and Language Science

   November 17, 4-6pm, 2102 Shoemaker

3. Language Learning as Language Creation, and Vice Versa

   November 18, 10-12noon, 2102 Shoemaker

Directions to linguistics events are here.

Syntax Lab

A theory of consciousness must specify which mental states can be conscious and the conditions under which they become conscious. Recent research in psychology and neuroscience can settle both of these questions. Evidence strongly suggests that consciousness arises at a specific stage of processing in our perceptual systems, and it arises when and only when we are paying attention. Developing these proposals requires an account of what attention is, both psychologically and biologically. The talk ...

Reading and discussing Ursini's (2011) "Space and the Vision–Language Interface: A Model-Theoretic Approach".

Syntax Lab

On the 4th, we will be meeting in the CNL lunch room/conference room to read Wu and Bodomo's response to Cheng and Sybesma's work, "Classifiers ≠ Determiners", arguing against the (supposed?) semantic/distributional motivation for claiming classifier languages have a ClP as a maximal projection in the nominal domain, and not a DP.

Adult native speakers have a vast amount of knowledge (e.g., lexical, grammatical, pragmatic) of their first language, most of which is automatic, implicit, unverbalisable in nature. In contrast, L2 learners, as opposed to native speakers, rely more heavily on metalinguistic (Krashen, 1982), explicit, declarative (Ullman, 2004), less integrated (Jiang, 2007), less automatized (Segalowitz, 2003) knowledge and require more time, deliberate effort and conscious awareness to access and retrieve it. In my talk, I will ...

In recent years, moral psychologists have attempted to answer two big questions: What are the respective roles of intuition and reasoning in moral judgment? Are moral judgments made by a dedicated moral faculty, or by one or more domain-general processes? The dual-process theory of moral judgment, now a decade old, is an answer to the first question. I’ll provide an overview and update on the evidence supporting it. The dual-process theory, by explaining moral ...

The last of three lectures by Professor Mamoru Saito, of Nanzan University.

Location of AV Williams

Abstract

We learn how the words of a language are inflected, given a plain text corpus plus a small supervised set of known paradigms. The approach is principled, simply performing empirical Bayesian inference under a straightforward generative model that explicitly describes the generation of:

1. The grammar and subregularities of the language ...

The second of three lectures by Professor Mamoru Saito, of Nanzan University. The last lecture is on November 2, at 1:30, in the same location.

The first of three lectures by Professor Mamoru Saito, of Nanzan University. The next two are on November 1 (11:30) and 2 (1:30). All are in the same location.

Appalachian English exhibits sentences that seem to contain two subjects, as in (1), which are not possible in standard English:

(1) a. We don’t nobody know how long we have. (Montgomery and Hall 2004)

b. ... they didn' nobody live up there. (our fieldwork)

c. There can't nobody ride him. (Montgomery and Hall 2004)

d. ... there wouldn' nothin' go down through there. (Feagin 1979, 238)

Our investigation of these types of (split subject) sentences ...

In our models of grammatical knowledge, words play an important role. They are phonological atoms, influence the surrounding syntactic structure, and provide the criteria for evaluating that sentence's truth conditions. However, as linguistic theory has advanced, particularly in investigating the structures of polysynthetic/agglutinative languages, the primacy of words as the atoms of grammar has been scrutinized. Theories of grammar must have some notion of morphosyntax -- building complex words out of sublexical units. However ...

People are remarkably good at acquiring complex knowledge from limited data, as is required in learning causal relationships, categories, or aspects of language. Successfully solving inductive problems of this kind requires having good "inductive biases" -- constraints that guide inductive inference. Viewed abstractly, understanding human learning requires identifying these inductive biases and exploring their origins. I will argue that probabilistic models of cognition provide a framework that can facilitate this project, giving a transparent characterization of ...

Syntax Lab: Dustin Chacon

Pragmatic interpretations can be rapid and robust but are language-dependent inferences like scalar implicature preceded by semantic analysis? While many studies find an initial period of semantic interpretation (e.g., some interpreted as “some-and-possibly-all”), recent work has found that scalar implicatures are rapidly calculated when the quantifier was phonologically-reduced, providing a cue to the partitive construction (e.g., summa instead of some-of). This talk will examine possible reasons for this dichotomy. To distinguish between the ...

Beyond features such as color and shape, visual percepts can also involve properties that we typically associate with higher-level cognition -- such as animacy, intentionality, and goal-directedness. Cognitive scientists have long been captivated by such phenomena, but have faced challenges in studying them with precision, and in distinguishing true perceptual effects from higher-level inferences. I will describe and demonstrate several projects from our group that address these challenges, exploring the perception of animacy from some new ...

Infants learn to segment words from fluent speech during the same period as they learn the sounds of their native language, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which sounds appear. This talk presents computational and empirical work testing the hypothesis that the words infants segment from fluent speech provide a useful cue for learning about phonetic categories. Computational models illustrate how words can help an ideal learner acquire ...

This talk is in honor of the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award, awarded to Professor Colin Phillips.

We will be having a Thursday episode of the DPP this week. As a follow up to our discussion about the parameters underlying classifier languages from non-classifier languages and the discussion between Tang and Cheng and Sybesma about the "ClP Hypothesis", Dustin will be giving a practice talk for a CUNY Syntax Supper presentation. The claim is that there are observed head movement operations in the Bangla DP whose feeding and bleeding relationships show that ...

[Note on the location: the Benjamin Building is at the north end of the plaza it shares with Tawes and the Art-Sociology building, up the hill behind McKeldin, 700 yards from Marie Mount Hall.]

We are reading the chapter "Event Semantics" written by Barry Schein, forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. This will hopefully directly engage the (implicit or explicit) thoughts we've been having on "how many event variables there are" per clause, and the nature of the relevant thematic relations. For the first hour of our meeting, Alexander Williams will be there to clarify any issues we have with Barry's treatment, and raise ...

Please join us for six presentations given by undergraduate linguistics majors, summarizing the results of their summer (and on-going) research projects.

The Baggett Summer Scholarships are given to selected students to work as research assistants with faculty and graduate student mentors during the summer. They are generously funded by UMD Alum Dave Baggett (who was a Linguistics-Computer Science double major and who will join us for the presentations). We are happy to have Mr Baggett ...

Please join us for summer research presentations of work conducted by undergraduate recipients of the Summer Baggett Scholarship. Listen to great research and chat with David Baggett, founder of the scholarship and UMD alum, all while munching on delicious dessert morsels.

The undergraduate students who will be presenting their work this year (and their faculty advisors) are:

Jacqueline Phillips (Jeffrey Lidz) Faina Kostyukovsky (Jeffrey Lidz and Valentine Hacquard) Jessica Lee (Jeffrey Lidz) Victoria Peck (Jeffrey ...

Historically treatments of the mind have taken a third person perspective that has led to significant conceptual, methodological, and epistemological oversights. This talk will explore insights that can be gained when the mind is considered from a first person (i.e inside out) perspective. Methodologically, such an approach leads to the development and refinement of self report measures that when triangulated with behavioral and neuro-cognitive measures can provide valid insight into internal mental states. Conceptually ...

We will discuss Paul Pietroski's 1998 Mind article, "Actions, Adjuncts, and Agency".

Back to the morning meeting for the DPP this Friday. We will be discussing Cheng and Sybesma's (1999) discussion of Chinese nominals from their LI paper "Bare and Not-So-Bare Nouns and the Structure of NP". This is one instantiation of the hypothesis that, for classifier languages, ClP is the maximal nominal projection. Cheng and Sybesma (2005) is an auxiliary reading, looking at how this claim is supported/instantiated via a variety of Sinitic languages.

At this week's lab meeting Annie Gagliardi will present some new findings. The details are under wraps, but we can be fairly confident that it will be some interesting new findings on how learners generalize from the input.

(This defense replaces the original IGERT lunch talk by Robert Slevc, which is rescheduled to 11/17.)

We'll be discussing sections 1.6.1, 2.1, 2.2, 7.1, and 7.6 of Jackendoff's 1990 book (Semantic Structures).

[This talk will be during Valentine's seminar, and will proceed in the manner of a seminar. But all are welcome.]

Supposition is a unique kind of attitude: its conscious, self-guided nature often means the experiencer is aware of what would ordinarily be an instance of a non-de se ascription: in imagining how one appears to others, one manages a form of self-identification with the object of visualization. In this discussion, I will examine several ...

Dave Kush & Dustin Chacón will lead a double-header presentation on upcoming studies that they are hoping to run on sentence comprehension in Hindi, in India.

There will be a meeting of the DPP on Thursday, Sept. 29th at 3:30 PM in the CNL lunch room / conference room. We're going to be reading Laura Brugè's chapter "The Positions of Demonstratives in the Extended Nominal Projection" and a 2004 handout of Richard Larson's, in the "Books" and "Determiners" subfolders of the group's PDF Locker folder, respectively.

Humans are unique in their knowledge of natural number, and much recent developmental work has been geared to understanding how children develop the representations central to this knowledge. One prominent view holds that this development partially depends on utilizing the representational resources underlying natural language quantification (Carey 2010). Thus it may be that understanding the acquisition and representation of quantifier meanings is logically prior to understanding those for natural number. I address two questions: (1 ...

This week we are discussing //variables//, reading pp116-128 of Frege's "Foundations of Arithmetic, and Boolos's "To be is to be a value of a variable (or to be some values of some variables)".

The Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning is an event designed to bring together students taking computational approaches to speech, language, and learning, so that they can introduce their research to the local student community, give and receive feedback, and engage each other in collaborative discussion.

Many philosophers, psychologists, and lay people think that moral reasoning is a reliable way to find moral truth. I will survey evidence indicating that reasoning evolved and is well-designed to serve social functions such as reputation management and navigation within a complex world of accountability constraints. To maintain that moral reasoning is (or should be) more important or more trusted than moral intuition, in the absence of evidence that people can reason dispassionately about moral ...

Some administrative stuff has been cleared up, and we've decided to move to a weekly schedule where on alternating weeks we discuss (1) a couple of readings in depth, and (2) experiment design. On Sept.21 we'll discuss Massad, Hubbard, Newtson (1979), "Selective Perception of Events".

Grand opening ceremonies for the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. Anyone is welcome but if possible you should RSVP in advance to vpr@umd.edu.

Patrick G. O'Shea, Vice President for Research, cordially invites you to attend the Grand Opening Ceremony and Open House of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

12:00 - 1:00 PM: Grand Opening Ceremony

1:00 - 5:00 PM: Open House and Tours

Light refreshments served.

Maryland Neuroimaging Center ...

Language Science Day aims to bring together the cross-departmental community of language science students and faculty to improve awareness of the rich opportunities for language science at the University of Maryland. The goal is to showcase research activities and opportunities, to make students aware of training possibilities, and to jump-start potential interdisciplinary connections.

We will be having the second meeting of the DPP this week at 9:30 on Friday in the CNL Lunch/Conference Room. We will be discussing Željko Bošković's 2008 paper "What will you have, NP or DP?", available in the PDF Locker. In the next few weeks, we hope to address the issue of how much the "D" part of the DP Hypothesis matters, what case/agreement have to do with the subject ...

A theory of conceptual development must specify the innate representational primitives, must characterize the ways in which the initial state differs from the adult state, and must characterize the processes through which one is transformed into the other. I will defend three theses. With respect to the initial state, the innate stock of primitives is not limited to sensory, perceptual, or sensory-motor representations; rather, there are also innate conceptual representations. With respect to developmental change ...

PHLING (philosophy & linguistics) holds its weekly meeting this week. This is the first real discussion meeting of the semester, so we're revisiting some basics. We'll talk about Chapter 2 “Event Concepts” by Casati & Varzi (pp. 31-53), and Chapter 15 “The Role of Segmentation in Perception and Understanding of Events” by Schwan & Garsoffky (pp. 391-415), both found in the anthology Understanding Events.

There will be a meeting of the Determiner Phrase Posse at 9:30 AM on Friday the 9th in the lunch room/conference room in the CNL lab. We will be discussing goals and agendas for the fall semester, possible readings and possible presentation/work-through-data-as-a-team days, and chapter 1 of Abney's 1987 thesis, "The English Noun Phrase In Its Sentential Aspect". See you there!

This week, we continue our round of introductions. Tell us who you are and what you're up to. Ground rules: 1 slide maximum, please email your slide to Jeff by at least 11:55am on Friday. Bonus points for creative use of the slide. Points deducted for egregious twisting of the meaning of "one slide". We continue to work in order of senility, so ...

I will present a general cognitive architecture which formalizes computational relations between the mind and the brain. Principles of neural computation yield an emergent property that constitutes a new principle of mental organization: mental processes compute representations that are optimal. Representations in a given cognitive component are optimal with respect to ‘soft’ constraints that characterize the world as cognized in that component. In addition to optimization, neural computation provides another key process: quantization. This process ...

The first LGSA (Linguistics Graduate Student Association) meeting of the 2011-2012 academic year.

Some topics to discuss include:

• Finding 2 new LGSA reps for this academic year (Sol and Dan are stepping down)
• A colloquium committee member volunteering opportunity

All students are welcome to attend. There will be snacks. Please let Dan know if there is anything you would like me to bring up.

This week we plan to kick off the year in our customary fashion, by starting a round of introductions. Tell us who you are and what you're up to. Ground rules: 1 slide maximum, please email your slide to me by at least 11:57am on Friday. Bonus points for creative use of the slide. Points deducted for egregious twisting of the meaning of "one slide". We'll work in order of senility, so ...

PHLING (Philosophy & Linguistics research group) has its first meeting of the semester. We will discuss administrative issues (when to meet on a regular basis, plans for the symposium and speaker series, etc), and chapter 15 of the book Understanding Events, "The Role of Segmentation in Perception and Understanding of Events".

The Japanese reflexive zibun has been thought to allow binding long distance (LD) as well as local binding. In the analysis developed here, zibun is locally bound in a domain of projection whose head is defined by a POV (point of view) feature   these projections are each headed by an auxiliary which is defined by such semantic or pragmatic notions as direct experience (emotion, sensation), evidentiality, evaluation, benefactive, and deixis. What appears to be LD ...

At this meeting faculty and students will introduce themselves and the department to our newest members: graduates, Baggetts, postdocs and visitors. The meeting will be followed by lunch.

In this brief tutorial for both students and faculty, Pedro will walk us all through how to use the new website, and advise new members of the department on how to use the Locker and our Wikis.

That we perceive our environment as a unified scene rather than individual streams of auditory, visual, and other sensory information has recently provided motivation to move past the long-held tradition of studying these systems separately. Although they are each unique in their transduction organs, neural pathways, and cortical primary areas, the senses are ultimately merged in a meaningful way which allows us to navigate the multisensory world. Investigating how the senses are merged has become ...

This dissertation explores the hypothesis that language processing proceeds in “windows” that correspond to representational units, where sensory signals are integrated according to time-scales that correspond to the rate of linguistic information. To investigate universal mechanisms, a comparison of signed and spoken languages is necessary. Underlying the seemingly effortless process of language comprehension is the perceiver’s knowledge about the rate at which linguistic form and meaning unfold in time and the ability to adapt ...

The workshop is open to all. The first day will include tutorial style presentations on functional and structural imaging techniques. The second day includes presentations from local students and faculty about their cognitive neuroscience research.

Thursday 10-12: Luiz Pessoa - Introduction to Functional MRI 1-3: Wang Zhan, MR Physicist - MR Physics and Diffusion Imaging 3:15-4: Thomas Carlson

Friday 9:30-4: Presentations by local students and faculty about their research

The precise contribution and mechanism of sensory feedback (particularly auditory feedback) in successful speech production is unclear. Some models of speech production, such as DIVA, assert that speech production is based on attempting to produce auditory (and/or somatosensory targets; e.g. Guenther et al. 2006), and thus assign a central role to sensory feedback for successful speech motor control. These models make explicit predictions about the neural basis of speech production and the integration ...

What kind of algorithm is used to search sentence representations in working memory during online sentence processing? The alternatives we consider are (i) a serial algorithm that searches the sentence representation by traversing its graph structure and (ii) a parallel algorithm that queries the entire representation at once. The experiments and computational model described here provides evidence that contributes to this debate. We exploit a grammatical constraint in Brazilian Portuguese that requires a specific long-distance ...

This paper deals with the perception of nonnative vowel contrasts by highly proficient bilinguals, as well as the relationship between these perceptual processes and spoken word recognition processes in a bilingual’s nonnative language. To this end, in section I, I introduce some fundamental issues in L2 production and perception, briefly review select theoretical models of L1 constraints on the perception and acquisition of nonnative contrasts by naïve and L2 listeners, and review some empirical ...

This thesis investigates the implications of binding phenomena for the development of a reductionist theory of grammatical dependencies. The starting point is the analysis of binding and control in Hornstein (2001, 2009). A number of revisions are made to this framework in order to develop a simpler and empirically more successful account of binding phenomena.

The major development is the rejection of economy-based accounts of Condition B effects. It is argued that Condition B effects ...

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the nature of intervention effects seen in various constructions like Wh-scope marking, raising and passivization. In particular, this dissertation argues in favor of a movement account for all these cases and supports the idea that (syntactic) movement is inevitable and sufficient enough to provide a unified account of various structural relations (Hornstein, 2009). It further argues that movement always happens in narrow syntax, even when it isn ...

This paper offers a unified analysis for a non-trivial range of the occurrences of bipartite argument reciprocals in the Indo-European languages, which also accounts for the wide range of readings known to be available to reciprocal sentences.

This study investigates properties of adjunct control with a particular focus on Turkish providing an analysis for different types of adjunct control structures such as temporal adjunct clauses and purpose clauses, which have been understudied in Turkish linguistics.

In analyzing adjunct control structures, I use Agree-based Theory of Control (ATC) (Landau 2000 and 2004) as a theoretical basis. I introduce a new interarboral operation that I call “Interarboreal Agree” which draws upon the intuitions of ...

Register by May 31 to take advantage of the discounted fee ($75 for regular; $40 for students). Email 42ndACAL@gmail.com for more information.

Full information about this conference including the registration and the schedule are available at: http://acal2011.umd.edu/node

This thesis is concerned with the nature of memory access during the construction of long-distance dependencies in online sentence comprehension. In recent years, an intense focus on the computational challenges posed by long-distance dependencies has proven to be illuminating with respect to the characteristics of the architecture of the human sentence processor, suggesting a tight link between general memory access procedures and sentence processing routines (Lewis & Vasishth 2005; Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke 2006; Wagers, Lau ...

If we conceptualize a theory of human sentence comprehension as a combination of (1) a grammar (2) a strategy for using the rules of the grammar and (3) some architectural facilities like memory we still have a huge space of possible theories. It would be nice to narrow this class down to just those that somehow made sense in relation to the communicative function sentence-comprehension often serves.

This talk examines a smaller class of comprehension ...

Illusory Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing in (1) is ungrammatical, yet temporarily treated as acceptable in online processing.

(1) *[The bill [that no senators voted for]] will ever become a law.

This phenomenon has been presented as evidence for a cue-based retrieval mechanism. A competing account argues that the effect reflects overapplication of pragmatic inference mechanisms involved in regular NPI licensing. Existing evidence shows that illusory NPI licensing is robust across tasks and languages, but ...

Abstract

Producing and perceiving sound contrasts in a second language (L2) can be hard, particularly for adult learners. This difficulty persists despite high proficiency and lengthy exposure to the target language (Flege, Bohn, & Jang, 1997; Pallier, Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997; Pallier, Colomé, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001). A key issue in L2 speech perception research is whether these difficulties are due to nonnative-like perception, representation, or both. We report results from two studies that show that [1] even highly ...