Laurel Perkins of the University of Maryland (http://ling.umd.edu/~perkinsl/) will present “How to Grow a Grammar: Syntactic Development in 1-Year-Olds” on Friday Feb. 15th at 3:30 PM in N400. All are welcome – an abstract follows.

ABSTRACT: What we can learn depends on what we already know; a child who can’t count cannot learn arithmetic, and a child who can’t segment words cannot identify properties of verbs in her language. Language acquisition, like learning in general, is incremental. How do children draw the right generalizations about their language using incomplete and noisy representations of their linguistic input?

In this talk, I’ll examine some of the first steps of syntax acquisition in 1-year-old infants, using behavioral methods to probe their linguistic representations, and computational methods to ask how they learn from those representations. Taking argument structure as my case study, I will show: (1) that infants represent core clause arguments like “subject” and “object” when learning verbs, (2) that infants can cope with “non-basic” clause types, where those arguments have been displaced, by ignoring some of their input, and (3) that it is possible for infants to learn what kind of data to ignore, even before they can parse it. I will argue that the approach I take for studying this particular learning problem will generalize widely, allowing us to build new models for understanding the role of development in grammar learning.