Mike Clauss writes:
Next week at the meeting of LARC we're going to try something new: having a reading group discussion.
LARC meetings have traditionally been focused on new and in-development acquisition research being done by UMass community members. This provides us all a lot of opportunity to workshop our ideas and fine tune experimental designs. But, there is a wide world of acquisition work out there, some of which makes assumptions that we often don't think too much about here, or uses methodologies which might not be widely used here. So, reading recent journal articles on acquisition work will be a way to learn about the variety that exists, and make sense of the sort of talks we are likely to see at places like BUCLD and other acquisition conferences where people of various theoretical backgrounds (and, in particular, psychologists working on acquisition) tend to be.
To that end, we will be reading and discussing next week articles from a recent issue of Language Acquisition (Vol 22 Issue 3; 2015 -- available online through the library). There are four articles; feel free to come having read any number of them. The titles are below.
The effect of input on children's cross-categorical use of polysemous noun-verb pairs (Lippeveld and Oshima-Takane)Object clitic omission in Child Spanish: evaluating representational and processing accounts (Mateu)Bootstrapping the syntactic bootstrapper: probabilistic labeling of prosodic phrases (Gutman, Dautriche, Crabbe, and Cristophe)Isomorphism for all (but not both): floating as a means to investigate scope (Tieu)
The hope is to have a largely student-run discussion, but anyone who is interested in acquisition in general or any of these particular topics should feel free to come, listen, and share thoughts.
LARC meets Wednesdays at 12:15 in ILC N458.
