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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...