Kristen Syrett
Biographic Data
| ID | 801429 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kristen Syrett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kristen |
| FAMILY NAME | Syrett |
| SIGNATURE | SYRETT K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3773-3035 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
When and why parts count: Linking categorization and counting of partial objects
More hard words: Learning emotion and mental state adjectives from linguistic context
How do young children learn the meanings of adjectives that label emotions and mental states, like happy or confident? The concepts behind these words seem easy to grasp, and yet the properties they denote are abstract and lack reliable visual correlates, much as with verbs such as think or know. There is robust evidence that the linguistic context in which mental state verbs appear supports their acquisition. Using a two-pronged approach, we exp…
Using syntax and semantics to acquire subjective adjective meanings
Adjectives like good, nice, pretty, and big are among the most frequent adjectives heard by children in the ambient language, and among the first adjectives produced by children. While these gradable adjectives are ostensibly short and sweet, their abstract semantic representations encode reference to features of the discourse context, including speaker subjectivity, which are surprisingly complex, and which also give rise to specific subclasses.…
Variation by Context: The Importance of Pragmatics and the Discourse
I argue that the variation within and across contexts detailed by Shin & Miller is indicative of a broader phenomenon in which morphosyntax and the discourse context are intertwined, including elements like perspective, discourse relations, information structure, and common ground. Appealing to independent evidence highlighting the role of pragmatics in language acquisition, I suggest that the current research invites us to think more carefully a…
Challenges and Strategies for Acquiring Adjectives
Children acquiring language must learn a variety of words mapping on to different kinds of concepts. Typically, word learning accounts focus on how children strategically acquire words for entities (nouns) and events (verbs). Often underrepresented are word for properties (adjectives). While adjectives, like verbs, may trail behind many nouns in early production, and may not always be required to refer or express truth-conditional meaning, they a…
Syntactic bootstrapping with clausal complements of adjectives
Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some – like red, round, rough, or rectangular – map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others – like ready, reasonable, or required – express abstract properties that have no reliable, physical correlate. Even for those adjectives whose properties are observable, how does a child know that one particular property is being highlighted above all oth…
Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults
Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities i…
Supporting adjective learning across the curriculum by 5-7 year-olds: Insights from psychological research
Adjectives are a powerful tool for enriching vocabulary and developing conceptual understanding. In early elementary and primary classrooms, across core and foundation subjects, children are expected to describe, measure, classify, and compare objects and events-all processes that require a mastery of adjective meanings and use. While teachers are trained in vocabulary learning, they may be less familiar with: (i) the psychological processes by w…
Establishing upper bounds in English monolingual and Heritage Spanish-English bilingual language development
Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to all) in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical entries with some. Such is the case with some in English and unos and algunos in Spanish. Indeed, Heritage Spanish…
Gender bias in linguistics textbooks: Has anything changed since Macaulay & Brice 1997
Macaulay and Brice (1997:798) surveyed example sentences in eleven syntax textbooks published from 1969–1994 and found that virtually all of the authors ‘favor male-gendered NPs as subjects and agents, and regularly stereotype both genders’. In this article, we address the question of whether constructed example sentences in more recent textbooks show similar gender bias. We present an analysis of six syntax textbooks published from 2005–2017, fr…
Gender bias in linguistics textbooks: Has anything changed since Macaulay & Brice 1997
Macaulay and Brice (1997:798) surveyed example sentences in eleven syntax textbooks published from 1969–1994 and found that virtually all of the authors ‘favor male-gendered NPs as subjects and agents, and regularly stereotype both genders’. In this article, we address the question of whether constructed example sentences in more recent textbooks show similar gender bias. We present an analysis of six syntax textbooks published from 2005–2017, fr…
Antecedent-Contained Deletion
This chapter introduces the linguistic phenomenon of Antecedent-Contained Deletion (ACD): a type of construction in which a site of Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) is contained in the antecedent from which it derives its interpretation. The chapter reviews theoretical approaches to resolving interpretation in ACD structures (drawing primarily on the covert movement operation of Quantifier Raising (QR)), and the accessibility of one or more sentential …
Distributivity
This chapter introduces the related topics of distributivity, collectivity, and cumulativity. Evidence is reviewed for the availability of multiple readings of ambiguous sentences that support distributive and collective interpretations, and the constrained interpretation of sentences arising from the lexical semantics of a universal quantifier, a predicate (adjective), an adverbial modifier, a determiner, or quantification scope. Off-line tasks …
An Experimental Investigation of the Scope of Object Comparative Quantifier Phrases
Recent investigations of the constraints on the scope of Comparative Quantifier Phrases (CQPs) (Takahashi 2006; Mayr & Spector 2012; Fleisher 2015) have revealed a puzzle: while CQPs give the appearance of behaving like typical generalized quantifier phrases in some environments, they seem to have a more restricted scopal range than other quantificational phrases, apparently resisting inverse scope over indefinite subjects, except in certain disc…
Factors licensing embedded present tense in speech reports
According to Ogihara (1995), the usage of the embedded present in a speech reportsuch as John said that Mary is in the room is restricted by the cause of John’s belief (the statethat made John think that Mary is in the room): the present tense can be used only if thiscause still holds at the time that John said that Mary is in the room is uttered. This paperpresents experimental evidence demonstrating that this is only one of the factors that lic…
The influence of conversational context and the developing lexicon on the calculation of scalar implicatures: Insights from Spanish-English bilingual children
Although monolingual children do not generally calculate the upper-bounded scalar implicature (SI) associated with ‘some’ without additional support, monolingual Spanish-speaking children have been reported to do so with algunos (‘some’), and further distinguish algunos from unos . Given documented cross-linguistic influence in interface phenomena in bilinguals, we asked whether young Spanish-English bilinguals calculate SIs with algunos , or if …
Investigating the form-meaning mapping in the acquisition of English and Japanese measure phrase comparatives
Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of Appositives
Appositive constructions (My friend Sophie, (who is) a classical violinist, performed a piece by Mozart) have stood at the center of debates concerning the range of possible meanings, and more specifically the status of not-at-issue entailments. However, it remains an open question what precisely their semantic and pragmatic contribution is to the sentence in which they appear. Here, we address this question head-on experimentally. We first inves…
Events and agents in the acquisition of universal quantification
Experimental Support for Inverse Scope Readings of Finite-Clause-Embedded Antecedent-Contained-Deletion Sentences
Unlike its overt counterpart, wh-movement, Quantifier Raising (QR) is typically assumed not to be able to cross a finite clause boundary. Two effects of this clause-boundedness constraint are that (a) a universal quantifier that is embedded in a finite clause is judged to be unable to take scope over an indefinite in subject position, and (b) in sentences in which antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) is embedded in a finite clause, a matrix readin…
Production and perception of listener-oriented clear speech in child language
In this paper, we ask whether children are sensitive to the needs of their interlocutor, and, if so, whether they – like adults – modify acoustic characteristics of their speech as part of a communicative goal. In a production task, preschoolers participated in a word learning task that favored the use of clear speech. Children produced vowels that were longer, more intense, more dispersed in the vowel space, and had a more expanded F0 range than…
Prosodic disambiguation of scopally ambiguous quantificational sentences in a discourse context
Researchers have long sought to determine the strength of the relation between prosody and the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences in English involving quantification and negation (e.g. All the men didn't go ). While Jackendoff (1972) proposed a one-to-one mapping between sentence-final contour and the scope of negation (falling contour: narrow scope, fall-rise contour: wide scope), in subsequent work, researchers (e.g. Ladd 1980; Ward…
The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions
Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising: Evidence from 4-Year-Old Children
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…
Prosodic disambiguation of scopally ambiguous quantificational sentences in a discourse context
Researchers have long sought to determine the strength of the relation between prosody and the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences in English involving quantification and negation (e.g. All the men didn't go ). While Jackendoff (1972) proposed a one-to-one mapping between sentence-final contour and the scope of negation (falling contour: narrow scope, fall-rise contour: wide scope), in subsequent work, researchers (e.g. Ladd 1980; Ward…
Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising: Evidence from 4-Year-Old Children
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…
The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions
Experimental Support for Inverse Scope Readings of Finite-Clause-Embedded Antecedent-Contained-Deletion Sentences
Unlike its overt counterpart, wh-movement, Quantifier Raising (QR) is typically assumed not to be able to cross a finite clause boundary. Two effects of this clause-boundedness constraint are that (a) a universal quantifier that is embedded in a finite clause is judged to be unable to take scope over an indefinite in subject position, and (b) in sentences in which antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) is embedded in a finite clause, a matrix readin…
Challenges and Strategies for Acquiring Adjectives
Children acquiring language must learn a variety of words mapping on to different kinds of concepts. Typically, word learning accounts focus on how children strategically acquire words for entities (nouns) and events (verbs). Often underrepresented are word for properties (adjectives). While adjectives, like verbs, may trail behind many nouns in early production, and may not always be required to refer or express truth-conditional meaning, they a…
Supporting adjective learning across the curriculum by 5-7 year-olds: Insights from psychological research
Adjectives are a powerful tool for enriching vocabulary and developing conceptual understanding. In early elementary and primary classrooms, across core and foundation subjects, children are expected to describe, measure, classify, and compare objects and events-all processes that require a mastery of adjective meanings and use. While teachers are trained in vocabulary learning, they may be less familiar with: (i) the psychological processes by w…
Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising: Evidence from 4-Year-Old Children
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…
The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions
Production and perception of listener-oriented clear speech in child language
In this paper, we ask whether children are sensitive to the needs of their interlocutor, and, if so, whether they – like adults – modify acoustic characteristics of their speech as part of a communicative goal. In a production task, preschoolers participated in a word learning task that favored the use of clear speech. Children produced vowels that were longer, more intense, more dispersed in the vowel space, and had a more expanded F0 range than…
Prosodic disambiguation of scopally ambiguous quantificational sentences in a discourse context
Researchers have long sought to determine the strength of the relation between prosody and the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences in English involving quantification and negation (e.g. All the men didn't go ). While Jackendoff (1972) proposed a one-to-one mapping between sentence-final contour and the scope of negation (falling contour: narrow scope, fall-rise contour: wide scope), in subsequent work, researchers (e.g. Ladd 1980; Ward…
Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of Appositives
Appositive constructions (My friend Sophie, (who is) a classical violinist, performed a piece by Mozart) have stood at the center of debates concerning the range of possible meanings, and more specifically the status of not-at-issue entailments. However, it remains an open question what precisely their semantic and pragmatic contribution is to the sentence in which they appear. Here, we address this question head-on experimentally. We first inves…
Events and agents in the acquisition of universal quantification
Experimental Support for Inverse Scope Readings of Finite-Clause-Embedded Antecedent-Contained-Deletion Sentences
Unlike its overt counterpart, wh-movement, Quantifier Raising (QR) is typically assumed not to be able to cross a finite clause boundary. Two effects of this clause-boundedness constraint are that (a) a universal quantifier that is embedded in a finite clause is judged to be unable to take scope over an indefinite in subject position, and (b) in sentences in which antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) is embedded in a finite clause, a matrix readin…
The influence of conversational context and the developing lexicon on the calculation of scalar implicatures: Insights from Spanish-English bilingual children
Although monolingual children do not generally calculate the upper-bounded scalar implicature (SI) associated with ‘some’ without additional support, monolingual Spanish-speaking children have been reported to do so with algunos (‘some’), and further distinguish algunos from unos . Given documented cross-linguistic influence in interface phenomena in bilinguals, we asked whether young Spanish-English bilinguals calculate SIs with algunos , or if …
Investigating the form-meaning mapping in the acquisition of English and Japanese measure phrase comparatives
Factors licensing embedded present tense in speech reports
According to Ogihara (1995), the usage of the embedded present in a speech reportsuch as John said that Mary is in the room is restricted by the cause of John’s belief (the statethat made John think that Mary is in the room): the present tense can be used only if thiscause still holds at the time that John said that Mary is in the room is uttered. This paperpresents experimental evidence demonstrating that this is only one of the factors that lic…
Antecedent-Contained Deletion
This chapter introduces the linguistic phenomenon of Antecedent-Contained Deletion (ACD): a type of construction in which a site of Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) is contained in the antecedent from which it derives its interpretation. The chapter reviews theoretical approaches to resolving interpretation in ACD structures (drawing primarily on the covert movement operation of Quantifier Raising (QR)), and the accessibility of one or more sentential …
Distributivity
This chapter introduces the related topics of distributivity, collectivity, and cumulativity. Evidence is reviewed for the availability of multiple readings of ambiguous sentences that support distributive and collective interpretations, and the constrained interpretation of sentences arising from the lexical semantics of a universal quantifier, a predicate (adjective), an adverbial modifier, a determiner, or quantification scope. Off-line tasks …
An Experimental Investigation of the Scope of Object Comparative Quantifier Phrases
Recent investigations of the constraints on the scope of Comparative Quantifier Phrases (CQPs) (Takahashi 2006; Mayr & Spector 2012; Fleisher 2015) have revealed a puzzle: while CQPs give the appearance of behaving like typical generalized quantifier phrases in some environments, they seem to have a more restricted scopal range than other quantificational phrases, apparently resisting inverse scope over indefinite subjects, except in certain disc…
Establishing upper bounds in English monolingual and Heritage Spanish-English bilingual language development
Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to all) in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical entries with some. Such is the case with some in English and unos and algunos in Spanish. Indeed, Heritage Spanish…
Gender bias in linguistics textbooks: Has anything changed since Macaulay & Brice 1997
Macaulay and Brice (1997:798) surveyed example sentences in eleven syntax textbooks published from 1969–1994 and found that virtually all of the authors ‘favor male-gendered NPs as subjects and agents, and regularly stereotype both genders’. In this article, we address the question of whether constructed example sentences in more recent textbooks show similar gender bias. We present an analysis of six syntax textbooks published from 2005–2017, fr…
Gender bias in linguistics textbooks: Has anything changed since Macaulay & Brice 1997
Macaulay and Brice (1997:798) surveyed example sentences in eleven syntax textbooks published from 1969–1994 and found that virtually all of the authors ‘favor male-gendered NPs as subjects and agents, and regularly stereotype both genders’. In this article, we address the question of whether constructed example sentences in more recent textbooks show similar gender bias. We present an analysis of six syntax textbooks published from 2005–2017, fr…
Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults
Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities i…
Supporting adjective learning across the curriculum by 5-7 year-olds: Insights from psychological research
Adjectives are a powerful tool for enriching vocabulary and developing conceptual understanding. In early elementary and primary classrooms, across core and foundation subjects, children are expected to describe, measure, classify, and compare objects and events-all processes that require a mastery of adjective meanings and use. While teachers are trained in vocabulary learning, they may be less familiar with: (i) the psychological processes by w…
Syntactic bootstrapping with clausal complements of adjectives
Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some – like red, round, rough, or rectangular – map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others – like ready, reasonable, or required – express abstract properties that have no reliable, physical correlate. Even for those adjectives whose properties are observable, how does a child know that one particular property is being highlighted above all oth…
Variation by Context: The Importance of Pragmatics and the Discourse
I argue that the variation within and across contexts detailed by Shin & Miller is indicative of a broader phenomenon in which morphosyntax and the discourse context are intertwined, including elements like perspective, discourse relations, information structure, and common ground. Appealing to independent evidence highlighting the role of pragmatics in language acquisition, I suggest that the current research invites us to think more carefully a…
Challenges and Strategies for Acquiring Adjectives
Children acquiring language must learn a variety of words mapping on to different kinds of concepts. Typically, word learning accounts focus on how children strategically acquire words for entities (nouns) and events (verbs). Often underrepresented are word for properties (adjectives). While adjectives, like verbs, may trail behind many nouns in early production, and may not always be required to refer or express truth-conditional meaning, they a…
More hard words: Learning emotion and mental state adjectives from linguistic context
How do young children learn the meanings of adjectives that label emotions and mental states, like happy or confident? The concepts behind these words seem easy to grasp, and yet the properties they denote are abstract and lack reliable visual correlates, much as with verbs such as think or know. There is robust evidence that the linguistic context in which mental state verbs appear supports their acquisition. Using a two-pronged approach, we exp…
Using syntax and semantics to acquire subjective adjective meanings
Adjectives like good, nice, pretty, and big are among the most frequent adjectives heard by children in the ambient language, and among the first adjectives produced by children. While these gradable adjectives are ostensibly short and sweet, their abstract semantic representations encode reference to features of the discourse context, including speaker subjectivity, which are surprisingly complex, and which also give rise to specific subclasses.…
When and why parts count: Linking categorization and counting of partial objects
Linguistics (20 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (12 works) · Language Development and Disorders (9 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (7 works) · Cognitive psychology (7 works) · Mathematics (7 works) · Natural language processing (6 works)