Tom Roeper gave a talk on Strict Interfaces and the Acquisition of Ellipsis at MIT, November 16, 2017.

2oth Anniversary of Lawne (Language Acquistion Workshop New England) met with a full day of talks—most of them retrospectives by all the involved faculty—and a host of talks by students.  It had its traditional genuine workshop atmosphere—and thanks are due to all the UConn,UMass, MIT students and faculty who got it all co-ordinated, led by Emma Nguyen of UConn  (with help from Jaieun Kim,  Magda Oiry,  Barbara Pearson  and lots of others).

At the next LARC meeting at noon Friday in ILC N458, Marco Tulio Bittencourt (UMass Spanish and Portuguese) will speak on: “An analysis of the progressive periphrasis with stative verbs in Brazilian Portuguese”

Everyone Welcome!  

At the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA) on Mallorca, Jill deVilliers, Tom Roeper, and Jessica Kotfila gave presented a talk on 3 clause Long -Distance extraction “When do Children Use Recursion” and Tom Roeper, Jennifer Rau, Dagmar Bittner, Nadine Balbach, Milena Kuehnast, gave a talk “Cbildren do not Repair Presuppositions”. Former UMass visitors Anca Sevcenco, Maria Arche. Petra Schulz, and Angeliek van Hout all were involved in presentations as well.

Talking Brains Exhibit [Cosmo Caixa Museum Barcleona]

Angeliek van Hout and Tom Roeper visited the “Talking Brains” exhibit which has half a dozen ongoing language exhibits currently that involve experimentation in parsing and spectrogram visualization etc, as well as exhibits on parameter-setting and other linguistic principles.  We conferred with Wolfram Hinzen and his associates about bringing the NEMO Amsterdam exhibit on recursion to this Barcelona Science Museum.   The organizers were very positive about the possibility.

Tom Roeper gave an invited lecture on: Recursion, Strict Interfaces, and Multiple Grammars on December 3rd in Tjansin, China

at the 7th International Conference on Formal Linguistics.    There were 200 participants and Juan Uriagereka, former

UMass faculty, gave a lecture on his recent work on the mathematical connections between linguistics and physics.

Tom also had a chance to exchange ideas with a lively acquisition community in Beijing and others from Hong Kong.

A workshop on recursion in acquisition was held in Bucharest with a large UMass background (former student–Ana Perez, Visitors: Terue Nakato, Anca Sevcenco) on November 18, 2016:

Invited Speakers: Ana Perez (Toronto), Tom Roeper (UMass)

Other speakers: Terue Nakato (Japane), Anca Sevcenco (Bucharest)

These are all connected to and offshoots of the recursion project at UMass — and Mike Wilson and Rong Yin were acknowledged by Terue Nakato.

Program

Centre for the Study of Language Development and Language Communication

University of Bucharest

4 th Bucharest University Colloquium on Language Acquisition

18 – November 2016

Friday 18 November

Workshop on the Acquisition of Recursion

Casa Universitarilor, Sala de lectur?, 46 Dionisie Lupu Str.

Keynote lecture 1

Chair: TBA

10.00 – 11.00

Constraints and resilience in the child’s path to recursion

Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux – University of Toronto

11.00 – 11.30

Coffee-tea break

Session 1

Chair: TBA

11.30 – 12.00:

Relative clauses in child Japanese

Motoki Nakajima – Nagano Prefectural College, Miwa Isobe – Tokyo University of

the Arts, Reiko Okabe – Nihon University, Akiko Terunuma – Daito Bunka

University, Terue Nakato – Kitasato University, Sakumi Inokuma – Jissen

Women’s University & Shunichiro Inada – Meiji Pharmaceutical University

12.00 – 12.30:

The acquisition of possessive structures in Hungarian

Ágnes Tóth- Research Institute for Linguistics (HAS), Pázmány Péter University,

Budapest

12.30 – 14.00

Lunch

Keynote lecture 2

Chair: TBA

14.00 – 15.00

Cross linguistic perspectives on the acquisition path for recursion: the left- and

right-branching question

Tom Roeper –University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Session 2

Chair: TBA

15.00 – 15.30

Recursive nominal modification in Hindi and its acquisition

Benu Pareek

15.30 – 16.00

Recursion in the locative PP and relative clause domain: the view from Romanian

Anca Sevcenco & Larisa Avram – University of Bucharest

The Language Acquisition Resource Center (LARC) will have its first meeting 1200-130 Friday September 23, 2016 in ILC

Room: ILC 458 [may change–will be on door]

Agenda:

1. Introductions

2. Plan further meetings

3. Summer Activities:

Summary of Summer work on Recursion (Tom Roeper) in Dutch Nemo museum, Canada, Germany, Hungary.

Discussion of Plans for Structures for Assessment (Luiz Amaral)

Everyone is welcome!

This is a chance to:

Meet the acquisition Community and to

Schedule if you have ideas or projects to discuss,

Just learn about what is going on.

I just returned from Amsterdam Science Live where our team (Bart Hollebrandse and Angeliek van Hout and their students) tested 287 people, mostly children, on how they handle PP-recursion, and also possessive and compound recursion pilots (by Jaieun Kim and Michael Wilson). Bart has developed an app (as an official Apple Developer) and we hope to create a whole suite of them. They work with no adult help and the results are tabulated automatically. All of this was supported by our small NSF grant. It all went very well—and they have invited us to come back. See the official announcement below at http://www.sciencelive.nl/onderzoeken/een-zin-in-een-zin-in-een-zin-in-een-zin-kun-jij-dit-aan

Tom Roeper