Author Archives: Thuy Bui

About Thuy Bui

Linguist

The 20th Anniversary of LAWNE (Language Acquisition Workshop of New England)

The 20th Anniversary of LAWNE (Language Acquisition Workshop of New England), our local language acquisition workshop involving UMass, UConn, Smith, and MIT, will be held at UMass on Saturday, November 18th.

This semester, we will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of our workshop by having a talk series led by faculty members of the participating schools. Talks will be about open questions/areas for research in the field of acquisition with the focus of what has been done (to celebrate our 20th anniversary) and what still needs to be done (for the next 20 years). A full schedule can be found at the end of this post.

  • Faculty presenters:
  • UMass – Tom Roeper & Magda Oiry
  • UConn – Diane Lillo-Martin, William Snyder, & Letty Naigles
  • Smith – Jill de Villiers
  • MIT – Martin Hackl

In addition to special talks, there will be faculty/student presentations on their ongoing work in acquisition during lunch and dinner.

Coffee and breakfast will be served from 9:30am, and the first talk will start from 10:00am. lunch, and dinner will also be provided through funding from LARC at UMass and the UConn department.

If you have any questions about the event or how to RSVP, please contact Jaieun at jaieunkim@linguist.umass.edu

All are welcome!

Kristen Syrett gives department colloquium

Kristen Syrett (Rutgers) will give the department colloquium on Friday, September 23 at 3:30 in ILC N400. A title and abstract of her talk follow.

Title:

Challenges in children’s acquisition of comparatives

Abstract:

Comparative constructions can range from those that are quite simple and easy to interpret (Hillary is smarter than Donald.) to those that are complex, and wreak havoc on the sentence processer, often leaving the interpreter confused as to whether the sentence is acceptable, even if it is somehow interpretable (?More reporters wanted heri to talk about heri emails and health status than about Hillaryi/j’s considerable experience qualifying her for the Oval Office.). While comparatives such as the second example are admittedly uncommon in adult conversations, let alone child-directed speech, we somehow develop the capacity to make sense of these constructions in the course of language acquisition.

Let us assume that the ability to interpret comparative constructions rests (for the most part) with a bundle of grammatical mechanisms (for example, quantifier raising, interpretation of ellipsis), and structural relations like c-command. Given independent evidence from a number of acquisition studies that children can properly interpret constructions in which these aspects are implicated, we might predict that children would demonstrate early success with comparative constructions. However, children continue to produce non-adult-like comparatives well past age 5-6. And while comprehension of basic comparatives is manifested 2-3 years earlier (as one might expect), children’s interpretation of more complex comparatives remains notably non-adult-like. To what source(s) can we attribute this difference between children and adults?

In this talk, I will present evidence from a set of studies probing children’s interpretation of comparatives, focusing on the acquisition of differential comparatives in particular. The results highlight specific challenges children face as comparative constructions become increasingly more complex, in particular the features of the semantic representation giving rise to non-adult-like responses – even when those features are licensed by an adult-like grammar.