UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Island Constraints: What is there for children to learn?(2022) Hirzel, Mina; Lidz, Jeffrey; Lau, Ellen; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents behavioral studies that target the early syntactic representations of wh-movement during infancy and early childhood. Previous studies show that by 20 months-old, infants represent wh-movement and use this knowledge to respond to wh-questions during language comprehension tasks (Gagliardi 2012; Gagliardi et al., 2016; Seidl et al., 2003). Studies probing the nature of early representations of wh-movement show that by around 4 years-old, children represent island constraints (e.g., de Villiers et al., 1990; de Villiers & Roeper, 1995a, 1995b; Fetters & Lidz, 2016; Goodluck et al., 1992). It remains unclear how knowledge of wh-movement develops. What is the source of this ‘empirical gap’ between the onset of knowledge of wh- movement, and the observation that children respect island constraints? One possibility is that knowledge of island constraints is a component of Universal Grammar (e.g., Chomsky 1965, 1986; Hornstein & Lightfoot 1981). In this case, the ‘empirical gap’ in the linguistic abilities of infants compared to young children isn’t indicative of their linguistic knowledge, but rather the difficulties with testing infants and toddlers on complex syntax. Another possibility is that knowledge of island constraints is acquired via experience (e.g., Pearl & Sprouse, 2013). In this case, the ‘empirical gap’ reflects a knowledge gap, and there’s no evidence for knowledge of island constraints during infancy because it has yet to be acquired. Experiment 1 shows that by 19 months-old, infants have knowledge of wh-movement, and use this knowledge during language comprehension. Results are consistent with recent work which shows that 18 month-olds, but not 17 month-olds, know that wh-phrases co-occur with gap positions in wh-object questions (Perkins & Lidz, 2021). Experiment 2 shows that 3 year-olds respect locality constraints on wh-movement in wh- questions, and Experiment 3 shows that adults behave as expected on this task. Experiments 4 and 5 test children and adults on locality constraints on wh- movement in relative clauses, but these results are inconclusive (likely due to difficulties with moving the task online). The results of Experiment 3 raises challenges for learning hypotheses of island constraints which emphasize the role of linguistic experience. Learning models which propose that linguistic experience is the key factor in the acquisition of island constraints must consider these behavioral results when estimating the amount of data that the learner needs to solve the acquisition problem. These behavioral results are consistent with the hypothesis that knowledge of island constraints is innate, but further work is needed to close the ‘empirical gap’ between the onset of knowledge of wh- movement and the onset of knowledge of island constraints.Item Syntactic Bootstrapping in the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs(2015) Harrigan, Kaitlyn; Lidz, Jeffrey; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Attitude verbs (e.g., think, want, hope) report mental states. Learning the meanings of attitude verbs may be difficult for language learners for several reasons; including the abstractness of the concepts that they refer to, and the linguistic properties. In this dissertation, we investigate the learning process for these words, by looking at an asymmetry that has been observed in the acquisition trajectory: want, which refers to desires, has been claimed to be acquired before think, which refers to beliefs. We explore this asymmetry in attitude verb acquisition in two ways: by comparing interpretation of think and want, controlling for several methodological differences in the way they have previously been tested; and by investigating children’s sensitivity to syntactic distribution in interpreting and learning attitude verbs. We start with an observation that previous tasks comparing interpretation of think and want often tested these verbs under different experimental conditions. Tests of think required processing additional demands; including a conflict with reality, and a conflict with the child’s own mental state. In experiments 1-3, we test interpretation of want adding these additional task demands; and find that children are still adult-like in interpreting want sooner than they have reliably shown to be adult-like in interpreting think. In Experiment 4, we directly compare think and want in the same experimental context. We still find adult-like behavior with want and not think. These studies demonstrate that the observed asymmetry between think and want reflects a real acquisition asymmetry, and is not due to experimental artifacts. After establishing in experiments 1-4 that the asymmetry between think and want reflects real acquisition facts, we explore children’s learning mechanism for attitude verbs in experiments 5 and 6. We test children’s sensitivity to syntactic distribution in hypothesizing an unknown attitude verb’s syntax. In experiment 5, we find that children use syntactic complement to interpret sentences with a potentially unknown attitude verb. In experiment 6, we show that they integrate syntactic information into their semantic representation for this new verb; and continue to hypothesize a meaning based on syntactic frame in future experiences with the same verb.Item Input and Intake in Language Acquisition(2012) Gagliardi, Ann C.; Lidz, Jeffrey; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents an approach for a productive way forward in the study of language acquisition, sealing the rift between claims of an innate linguistic hypothesis space and powerful domain general statistical inference. This approach breaks language acquisition into its component parts, distinguishing the input in the environment from the intake encoded by the learner, and looking at how a statistical inference mechanism, coupled with a well defined linguistic hypothesis space could lead a learn to infer the native grammar of their native language. This work draws on experimental work, corpus analyses and computational models of Tsez, Norwegian and English children acquiring word meanings, word classes and syntax to highlight the need for an appropriate encoding of the linguistic input in order to solve any given problem in language acquisition.Item The bilingual acquisition of compound words and its relation to reading skills(2008-04-22) Cheng, Chenxi; Wang, Min; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigated how Chinese-English bilingual children process compound words in their two languages and how that processing skill in one language affects reading skill in the other language. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the bilingual acquisition of compound words, using a lexical-decision paradigm. Each compound was composed of two constituent morphemes in the target language. The combination of the translated equivalents of the constituents formed a new translated compound word (or nonword) in the nontarget language. In both Experiments 1 and 2, when the target language was English, the lexical status of translated compounds in the nontarget language was shown to affect the accuracy of lexical decisions in the target language. When the target language was Chinese, the effect of the lexical status in English was not significant in Experiment 1 and disappeared after the effect of familiarity was controlled in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 2 further showed that the effect of the lexical status of translated compounds was independent of semantic transparency and language proficiency. Those results provided evidence of decomposition in both semantically transparent and semantically opaque compounds. The stronger effect from L1 to L2 than from L2 to L1 is consistent with the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994). Experiment 3 investigated the awareness of compound words and reading skills and their relationship in a group of Grade 2 and Grade 3 Chinese-English bilingual children. Comparable tasks in Chinese and English were designed to test students' morphological awareness of compounds, phonological awareness, oral vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension. Results of structural equation modeling showed that, within each language, compound awareness was a significant predictor for both real-word naming and reading comprehension. Across languages, English compound awareness was a significant predictor for reading comprehension in Chinese. Those results suggest that compound awareness might play a critical role in the reading development of Chinese-English bilingual children.