Jeffrey Lidz
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 781735 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jeffrey Lidz |
| NOMBRES | Jeffrey |
| APELLIDO | Lidz |
| FIRMA | LIDZ J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8829-1495 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 42 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 111 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2001 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Mind the gap
In acquiring a syntax, children must detect evidence for abstract structural dependencies that can be realized in variable ways in the surface forms of sentences. In What did David fix? , learners must identify a nonlocal relation between a fronted object of the verb ( what ) and the phonologically null ‘gap’ in canonical direct object position after the verb, where it is thematically interpreted. How do learners identify a nonadjacent dependency…
Thematic Content, Not Number Matching, Drives Syntactic Bootstrapping
Children use correlations between the syntax of a clause and the meaning of its predicate to draw inferences about word meanings. On one proposal, these inferences are underwritten by a structural similarity between syntactic and semantic representations: learners expect that the number of clause arguments exactly matches the number of participant roles in the event concept under which its referent is viewed. We argue against this proposal, and i…
Parser-grammar transparency and the development of syntactic dependencies
A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in developmental time to demonstrate that as new grammatical knowledge becomes available to children, they u…
Psycholinguistic evidence for restricted quantification
Syntactic bootstrapping attitude verbs despite impoverished morphosyntax
Attitude verbs like think and want describe mental states (belief and desire) that lack reliable physical correlates that could help children learn their meanings. Nevertheless, children succeed in doing so. For this reason, attitude verbs have been a parade case for syntactic bootstrapping. We assess a recent syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, in which children assign belief semantics to verbs whose complement clauses morphosyntactically resemb…
Cognitive inhibition explains children’s production of medial wh -phrases
Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child’s hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children’s productions of medial wh-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative account of these productions as performance errors arising from underdeveloped cognitive inhibition. We offer ex…
Do children know wh anything? 3-year-olds know the ambiguity of wh -phrases in Mandarin
Wh-phrases in Mandarin have an interrogative (like English what) and an indefinite (like English a/some) interpretation. Previous comprehension studies find that children can access both interpretations around 4.5 years old; studies with younger children focus on production and find that children between 2 and 4.5 do not reliably produce the indefinite interpretation in naturalistic speech or in elicited imitation tasks. In this article, we use c…
The mental representation of universal quantifiers
Japanese children’s knowledge of the locality of zibun and kare
Although the Japanese reflexive zibun can be bound both locally and across clause boundaries, the third-person pronoun kare cannot take a local antecedent. These are properties that children need to learn about their language, but we show that the direct evidence of the binding possibilities of zibun is sparse and the evidence of kare is absent in speech to children, leading us to ask about children’s knowledge. We show that children, unlike adul…
The hunt for structure-dependent interpretation
Jacques Mehler's earliest work concerned the independence of syntactic and semantic representations in adult sentence understanding, probing for independent contributions of sentence structure and sentence meaning in the psychological processes that underlie linguistic perception (e.g., Mehler, 1963; Mehler & Miller, 1964). The bulk of his career was spent pioneering the study of infants' linguistic cognition. In this paper, we bring these two st…
On the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs
Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few c…
A longitudinal evaluation of government-sponsored job skills training and basic employment services among U.S. baby boomers with economic disadvantages
Job skills training is a cost-effective strategy for improving employment among individuals who have low income and employment barriers, but few U.S. government-sponsored employment program participants have received such training. To better understand long-term gains from job skills training, this study compared employment and earnings trajectories between program participants who received job skills training and those who received basic service…
The development of language and its interaction with other aspects of cognition
Preschool children acquiring English and Brazilian Portuguese display a peculiar behavior when prompted to produce multi-clause wh-questions. In elicited production tasks, structures with an extra wh-element in medial position are sometimes produced. Such medial questions are impossible in the adult languages being acquired. Following a hypothesis put forth by Grolla & Lidz (2018), we propose that children’s productions are not generated by child…
Null Objects in Korean
Null object (NO) constructions in Korean and Japanese have received different accounts: as (a) argument ellipsis ( Oku 1998 , S. Kim 1999 , Saito 2007 , Sakamoto 2015 ), (b) VP-ellipsis after verb raising ( Otani and Whitman 1991 , Funakoshi 2016 ), or (c) instances of base-generated pro ( Park 1997 , Hoji 1998 , 2003 ). We report results from two experiments supporting the argument ellipsis analysis for Korean. Experiment 1 builds on K.-M. Kim a…
Prosody and Function Words Cue the Acquisition of Word Meanings in 18-Month-Old Infants
Language acquisition presents a formidable task for infants, for whom word learning is a crucial yet challenging step. Syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) has been robustly shown to be a cue to word meaning. But how can infants access syntactic information when they are still acquiring the meanings of words? We investigated the contribution of two cues that may help infants break into the syntax and give a boost to their lexical…
Hope for syntactic bootstrapping
We explore children's use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want , and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but have syntactic distributions predictive of semantic properties, we hypothesize that syntax may serve as an important cue to learning their meanings. Using a novel methodology, we replicate previous literature showing an asymmetry between acquisition of…
The importance of input representations
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Children’s comprehension of pronouns and definites
We present an experiment which tests children’s comprehension of the requirementsof use of pronouns and definites. An adult-like use of definites and pronouns imposes differentbut related requirements. In the case of definites, a unique referent is required in the context,whereas in the case of a pronoun, the referent in the context has to be salient. In this experiment,we use a novel word task to test three-year-olds’ sensitivity to these requir…
Discovering the factivity of "know"
How do children discover which linguistic expressions are associated with presuppositions? Do they take a direct strategy of tracking whether linguistic expressions are associated with particular speaker presuppositions? This strategy may fail children who are trying to learn about the presuppositions of so-called 'soft' presupposition triggers, which can be readily used even when the relevant would-be presupposed content is not part of the commo…
On how verification tasks are related to verification procedures
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
This handbook provides a thorough and systematic investigation of the question of how we come to know a language. Researchers from all over the world explore the leading research questions within developmental linguistics, which include: What does the newborn child bring to the task of language acquisition? What information must the child extract from her linguistic input? And how does biological maturation interact with the child’s developing li…
Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy
The present chapter focuses on fluent speech segmentation abilities in early language development. We first review studies exploring the early use of major prosodic boundary cues which allow infants to cut full utterances into smaller-sized sequences like clauses or phrases. We then summarize studies showing that word segmentation abilities emerge around 8 months, and rely on infants’ processing of various bottom-up word boundary cues and top-dow…
NPI Licensing and Beyond
This article presents a study of preschool-aged children’s knowledge of the semantics of the negative polarity item (NPI) any. NPIs like any differ in distribution from non-polarity-sensitive indefinites like a: Any is restricted to downward-entailing linguistic environments (Fauconnier 1975, 1979; Ladusaw 1979). But any also differs from plain indefinites in its semantic contribution; any can quantify over wider domains of quantification than pl…
How Nature Meets Nurture
Evidence of children’s sensitivity to statistical features of their input in language acquisition is often used to argue against learning mechanisms driven by innate knowledge. At the same time, evidence of children acquiring knowledge that is richer than the input supports arguments in favor of such mechanisms. This tension can be resolved by separating the inferential and deductive components of the language learning mechanism. Universal Gramma…
Expanding our Reach and Theirs
In 2007, we began an outreach program in Linguistics with psychology students in a local majority-minority high school. In the years since, the initial collaboration has grown to include other schools and nurtured a culture of community engagement in the language sciences at the University of Maryland. The program has led to a number of benefits for both the public school students and the University researchers involved. Over the years, our effor…
V-Raising and Grammar Competition in Korean
In a head-final language, V-raising is hard to detect since there is no evidence from the string to support a raising analysis. If the language has a cliticlike negation that associates with the verb in syntax, then scope facts concerning negation and a quantified object NP could provide evidence regarding the height of the verb. Even so, such facts are rare, especially in the input to children, and so we might expect that not all speakers expose…
Why children aren't universally successful with quantification
This paper explores preschooler's knowledge of the linguistic principles (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic) regulating the interaction between universally quantified noun phrases and negation. Previous work has shown that 5-year-olds differ systematically from adults in the way they interpret sentences containing these elements (Musolino 1998; Musolino et al. 2000). On the basis of these results, Musolino et al. conclude that the grammar of 5-ye…
How Nature Meets Nurture
Evidence of children’s sensitivity to statistical features of their input in language acquisition is often used to argue against learning mechanisms driven by innate knowledge. At the same time, evidence of children acquiring knowledge that is richer than the input supports arguments in favor of such mechanisms. This tension can be resolved by separating the inferential and deductive components of the language learning mechanism. Universal Gramma…
Equal Treatment for All Antecedents
Children have repeatedly been found to exhibit Principle B violations, with some reports that these violations occur only with nonquantified antecedents. This quantificational asymmetry (QA) in the delay of Principle B effect (DPBE) has been taken as support for a theory that restricts the scope of binding theory to bound variable anaphora (Reinhart 1983). However, the QA has been challenged, on the basis of discrepant findings and methodological…
Condition R
Reinhart and Reuland (1993) partition the set of anaphors into two syntactic subclasses: SELF anaphors, which reflexivize predicates, and, SE anaphors, which, like pronominals, do not. This partition is intended to capture the antilocality of the SE anaphors. I argue that the appropriate partitioning of anaphors is semantic and not syntactic. Reinhart and Reuland's SELF anaphors are "near-reflexives," interpreted as a representation of their ante…
Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition
This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit …
The Grammar of Accusative Case in Kannada
This article examines the distribution of accusative case morphology in Kannada, detailing the syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors that contribute to its occurrence. Accusative case morphology is optional on inanimate direct objects. When optional, its presence indicates a specific reading, which I argue is best modeled as a choice function. The specific readings due to morphological formare distinct fromspecific readings that arise fr…
Constructions on holiday
Constructions at Work provides many new empirical observations and sound criticisms of other work. These fail, however, to support Goldberg's two main arguments. They do not undermine the need for innate linguistic structure; nor do they decide for Construction Grammar in particular
Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising
We revisit the purported locality constraint on Quantifier Raising (QR) by investigating children's and adults' interpretation of antecedent-contained-deletion (ACD) sentences, where the interpretation depends on the landing site targeted by QR out of an embedded clause. When ACD is embedded in a nonfinite clause, 4-year-old children and adults access both the embedded and the matrix interpretations. When ACD is embedded in a finite clause, and t…
Expanding our Reach and Theirs
In 2007, we began an outreach program in Linguistics with psychology students in a local majority-minority high school. In the years since, the initial collaboration has grown to include other schools and nurtured a culture of community engagement in the language sciences at the University of Maryland. The program has led to a number of benefits for both the public school students and the University researchers involved. Over the years, our effor…
Statistical insensitivity in the acquisition of Tsez noun classes
This article examines the acquisition of noun classes in Tsez, looking in particular at the role of noun-internal distributional cues to class. We present a new corpus of child-directed Tsez speech, analyzing it to determine the proportion of nouns that children hear with this predictive information and how often this is heard in conjunction with overt information about noun class agreement. Additionally, we present an elicited production experim…
Interface transparency and the psychosemantics of most
Null Objects in Korean
Null object (NO) constructions in Korean and Japanese have received different accounts: as (a) argument ellipsis ( Oku 1998 , S. Kim 1999 , Saito 2007 , Sakamoto 2015 ), (b) VP-ellipsis after verb raising ( Otani and Whitman 1991 , Funakoshi 2016 ), or (c) instances of base-generated pro ( Park 1997 , Hoji 1998 , 2003 ). We report results from two experiments supporting the argument ellipsis analysis for Korean. Experiment 1 builds on K.-M. Kim a…
On the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs
Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few c…
Echo reduplication in Kannada and the theory of word-formation
This article demonstrates that Echo Reduplication in Kannada applies equally to words, subparts of words and entire syntactic phrases. Such a rule is problematic for a lexicalist grammatical architecture because it treats the internal structure of words as parallel to the internal structure of sentences, suggesting that there is no clear division between word structure and phrase structure. Numerous variants of the lexicalist architecture are exa…
Condition R
Reinhart and Reuland (1993) partition the set of anaphors into two syntactic subclasses: SELF anaphors, which reflexivize predicates, and, SE anaphors, which, like pronominals, do not. This partition is intended to capture the antilocality of the SE anaphors. I argue that the appropriate partitioning of anaphors is semantic and not syntactic. Reinhart and Reuland's SELF anaphors are "near-reflexives," interpreted as a representation of their ante…
Understanding how input matters
Constrained Flexibility in the Extension of Novel Causative Verbs
Why children aren't universally successful with quantification
This paper explores preschooler's knowledge of the linguistic principles (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic) regulating the interaction between universally quantified noun phrases and negation. Previous work has shown that 5-year-olds differ systematically from adults in the way they interpret sentences containing these elements (Musolino 1998; Musolino et al. 2000). On the basis of these results, Musolino et al. conclude that the grammar of 5-ye…
The Grammar of Accusative Case in Kannada
This article examines the distribution of accusative case morphology in Kannada, detailing the syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors that contribute to its occurrence. Accusative case morphology is optional on inanimate direct objects. When optional, its presence indicates a specific reading, which I argue is best modeled as a choice function. The specific readings due to morphological formare distinct fromspecific readings that arise fr…
Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning
Can infants use the syntactic context of an unknown word to infer that it is a verb, and thus refers to an action? Twenty-three-month-old French infants watching a moving object were taught novel verbs, within sentences that contained only function words (e.g. “il poune par là” / “it's pooning there”). Infants then watched two instances of the object undergoing either the familiar or a novel action and were asked to point towards the screen match…
V-Raising and Grammar Competition in Korean
In a head-final language, V-raising is hard to detect since there is no evidence from the string to support a raising analysis. If the language has a cliticlike negation that associates with the verb in syntax, then scope facts concerning negation and a quantified object NP could provide evidence regarding the height of the verb. Even so, such facts are rare, especially in the input to children, and so we might expect that not all speakers expose…
Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition
This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit …
Constructions on holiday
Constructions at Work provides many new empirical observations and sound criticisms of other work. These fail, however, to support Goldberg's two main arguments. They do not undermine the need for innate linguistic structure; nor do they decide for Construction Grammar in particular
Equal Treatment for All Antecedents
Children have repeatedly been found to exhibit Principle B violations, with some reports that these violations occur only with nonquantified antecedents. This quantificational asymmetry (QA) in the delay of Principle B effect (DPBE) has been taken as support for a theory that restricts the scope of binding theory to bound variable anaphora (Reinhart 1983). However, the QA has been challenged, on the basis of discrepant findings and methodological…
Meaning and Context in Children's Understanding of Gradable Adjectives
This paper explores what children and adults know about three specific ways that meaning and context interact: the interpretation of expressions whose extensions vary in different contexts (semantic context dependence); conditions on the felicitous use of expressions in a discourse context (presupposition accommodation) and informative uses of expressions in contexts in which they strictly speaking do not apply (imprecision). The empirical focus …
Selective learning in the acquisition of Kannada ditransitives
In this article we offer up a particular linguistic phenomenon, quantifier-variable binding in Kannada ditransitives, as a proving ground upon which competing claims about learnability can be evaluated with respect to the relative abstractness of children’s grammatical knowledge. We first identify one aspect of syntactic representation that exhibits a range of syntactic, morphological, and semantic consequences both within and across languages, n…
Interface transparency and the psychosemantics of most
Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising
We revisit the purported locality constraint on Quantifier Raising (QR) by investigating children's and adults' interpretation of antecedent-contained-deletion (ACD) sentences, where the interpretation depends on the landing site targeted by QR out of an embedded clause. When ACD is embedded in a nonfinite clause, 4-year-old children and adults access both the embedded and the matrix interpretations. When ACD is embedded in a finite clause, and t…
Conservativity and Learnability of Determiners
A striking cross-linguistic generalisation about the semantics of determiners is that they never express non-conservative relations. To account for this one might hypothesise that the mechanisms underlying human language acquisition are unsuited to non-conservative determiner meanings. We present experimental evidence that 4- and 5-year-olds fail to learn a novel non-conservative determiner but succeed in learning a comparable conservative determ…
How Nature Meets Nurture
Evidence of children’s sensitivity to statistical features of their input in language acquisition is often used to argue against learning mechanisms driven by innate knowledge. At the same time, evidence of children acquiring knowledge that is richer than the input supports arguments in favor of such mechanisms. This tension can be resolved by separating the inferential and deductive components of the language learning mechanism. Universal Gramma…
Expanding our Reach and Theirs
In 2007, we began an outreach program in Linguistics with psychology students in a local majority-minority high school. In the years since, the initial collaboration has grown to include other schools and nurtured a culture of community engagement in the language sciences at the University of Maryland. The program has led to a number of benefits for both the public school students and the University researchers involved. Over the years, our effor…
Statistical insensitivity in the acquisition of Tsez noun classes
This article examines the acquisition of noun classes in Tsez, looking in particular at the role of noun-internal distributional cues to class. We present a new corpus of child-directed Tsez speech, analyzing it to determine the proportion of nouns that children hear with this predictive information and how often this is heard in conjunction with overt information about noun class agreement. Additionally, we present an elicited production experim…
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
This handbook provides a thorough and systematic investigation of the question of how we come to know a language. Researchers from all over the world explore the leading research questions within developmental linguistics, which include: What does the newborn child bring to the task of language acquisition? What information must the child extract from her linguistic input? And how does biological maturation interact with the child’s developing li…
Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy
The present chapter focuses on fluent speech segmentation abilities in early language development. We first review studies exploring the early use of major prosodic boundary cues which allow infants to cut full utterances into smaller-sized sequences like clauses or phrases. We then summarize studies showing that word segmentation abilities emerge around 8 months, and rely on infants’ processing of various bottom-up word boundary cues and top-dow…
NPI Licensing and Beyond
This article presents a study of preschool-aged children’s knowledge of the semantics of the negative polarity item (NPI) any. NPIs like any differ in distribution from non-polarity-sensitive indefinites like a: Any is restricted to downward-entailing linguistic environments (Fauconnier 1975, 1979; Ladusaw 1979). But any also differs from plain indefinites in its semantic contribution; any can quantify over wider domains of quantification than pl…
Discovering the factivity of "know"
How do children discover which linguistic expressions are associated with presuppositions? Do they take a direct strategy of tracking whether linguistic expressions are associated with particular speaker presuppositions? This strategy may fail children who are trying to learn about the presuppositions of so-called 'soft' presupposition triggers, which can be readily used even when the relevant would-be presupposed content is not part of the commo…
On how verification tasks are related to verification procedures
The importance of input representations
Preview this article: The importance of input representations, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/lab.18051.lid-1.gif
Linguistics (37 obras) · Computer Science (34 obras) · Psychology (31 obras) · Philosophy (26 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (25 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (21 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (16 obras) · Natural language processing (15 obras) · Mathematics (14 obras) · Grammar (10 obras)