Roeper in Delhi

Tom Roeper gave a virtual talk at the colloquium series at IIT in Delhi on June 1. The title of his talk was “Minimalism and Acquisition."

Roeper in Frankfurt

Tom Roeper will be giving a talk entitled “Abstract Triggers and Acquisition” at the University of Frankfurt on June 28th.

Roeper at University of Toronto

Tom Roeper will be giving a talk entitled “Recursion and Interfaces” at a workshop on Complexity in Learnability and Development that the University of Toronto is hosting this Wednesday, May 25. Tom’s paper reports on his work with Petra Schulz. The Workshop is organized by UMass alumna Ana-Teresa Pérez-Leroux, who will also be giving talks at the workshop. For more information, go here.

Jeremy raps

Jeremy Hartman will give an Acquisition Rap at MIT on Saturday, April 30 at a conference in honor of Ken Wexler on the occasion of his retirement. Jeremy’s rap is “Building a corpus for root infinitives.” For more information about the event, and Jeremy’s rap, go here.

UMass at ECO 5

MIT is hosting the Graduate Student Workshop this Saturday, April 16, from 9:15 to dinner. UMass is represented by:

Deniz Ozyildiz who is giving the talk “Factivity alternates, at least in Turkish."

Nadine Balbach, Jeremy Hartman and Tom Roeper, who are giving the talk “Everyone but me — Children Acquiring the different notions of `but’ in Quantified Sentences."

Polina Berezovskaya will present the talk “Processing Ambiguous Degree Constructions Cross-Linguistically"

For more information, including a schedule and how to register, go here.

UMass at UUSLAW

The University of Connecticut is hosting the Conn-Umass-Smith Language Acquisition Workshop (UUSLAW) today, April 17, and UMass is represented by Nadine Balbach who is giving the talk “ `Everyone but me’ — Children Acquiring the Different Notions of but in Quantified Sentences” and by Tracy Conner who is giving the talk “Acquiring Ellipsis."

Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics

The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics edited by Jeff Lidz, William Snyder, and UMass faculty Joe Pater, will be appearing in May, and its cover and table of contents can now be seen on the OUP website.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-developmental-linguistics-9780199601264?cc=us&lang=en&#

The volume contains chapters by UMass faculty Gaja Jarosz and Tom Roeper (co-authored with Jill de Villiers), and alumna Anne-Michelle Tessier.

LARC

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.

DGfS in Konstanz February 24-26

The 38th annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Sprachwissenschaft will be held at Konstanz University this weekend. UMass is out in force:

Alumnus Kenneth Drozd is giving an invited talk “Cumulative universal quantification."

Tom Roeper, with Rebecca Woods, will be presenting the paper “Separating Tense and Assertion: Evidence from Embedded V2 and Child Language” and, with Jill de Villiers will be presenting the paper “How representations determine stages of acquisition.” and with Jennifer Rau, will present the paper “Children fail to repair presuppositions.

Magda Oiry will present the paper “How children deal with a contextually canceled presupposition."

Alumna Elena Benedicto will also be presenting the paper “Classifiers as agreement…or not?" 

Alumnus Florian Schwarz, with Cory Bill, Jeremy Zehr, Lyn Tieu and Jacopo Romoli, will present the paper “On the acquisition of presupposition projection."

You can learn more here.

Hartman at MIT

Jeremy Hartman will give two talks at MIT this week — one on Tuesday and the other on Wednesday. The titles and abstracts of his talks follow.

Tuesday, December 15:

What is this construction, that we should be puzzled by it?

I will discuss the construction exemplified below, where a wh- question is followed by a gapless subordinate clause:
 
      a.  What were you doing, that you couldn’t come help me?
            b.  Where is he from, that he talks like that?
            c.  Who are you, to make that demand?
            d.  What did she do, that everyone is so mad at her?

 
A puzzling fact about such sentences is that their declarative counterparts appear to be ungrammatical (*He is from Texas, that he talks like that, *I was on the phone, that I couldn't come help you).  Sentences like these have not, to my knowledge, received a detailed analysis in the syntactic literature. I will offer some preliminary observations about their syntactic properties, their meaning, and their relationship to other syntactic phenomena, including degree constructions.

Wednesday, December 16. ESSL/LacqLab 32-D461 at 5:00PM:

Building a corpus for root infinitives

I will present work in progress, on the development of a large database of children's optional infinitive utterances taken from the English CHILDES corpora, and coded for a variety of factors of interest.  I'll discuss how the database can be used to asses the effects of several syntactic and phonological factors that have been claimed to influence children's use of the root infinitive, as well as the interactions between these factors.

Call for papers: GALANA 7

The 7th biennial conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition - North America (GALANA 7) will take place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on September 8-10, 2016.

The GALANA conference features theoretically informed research on all types of language acquisition scenarios, including (but not limited to) monolingual first language acquisition, bilingual/multilingual first language acquisition, second language acquisition by children as well as adults, third language acquisition, acquisition of signed as well as spoken languages, language disorders, language acquisition in the presence of cognitive impairment and autism, and the development of pidgins and creoles. GALANA-7 will include a special session on ''Input Variation and Language Acquisition.''

The invited speakers for the main session are Cynthia Fisher (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Roumyana Slabakova (University of Southampton), and Virginia Valian (Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center).

The invited speakers for the special session on Input Variation and Language Acquisition are Karen Miller (Pennsylvania State University) and Janna Oetting (Louisiana State University).

Conference URL: https://publish.illinois.edu/galana2016/

Conference email: galana7.2016@gmail.com

Abstract Submission Deadline: 10-Feb-2016

GALANA-7 invites abstracts of no more than 500 words (with an optional second page for examples, figures and references) for double-blind peer review.

Guidelines and instructions about abstract submission can be found at https://publish.illinois.edu/galana2016/abstract-guidelines-and-submission/

For the general session, abstracts are invited for original, unpublished generative research in all acquisition subfields: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, bilingualism, multilingualism, creoles and pidgins, and language disorders.

Abstracts are also invited for a special session on Input Variation and Language Acquisition. Understanding how children use input to help form a grammar is central to an adequate theory of language acquisition. Broad differences in input based on dialect variation have been used as a fixed effect in explaining differences in children's grammars. Between-child differences within homogeneous samples of families, similar in socio-economic statuses, speaking the same dialect have also provided insight. The special session Input Variation and Language Acquisition asks how these two approaches relate to one another; specifically how language variety as a fixed effect relates to the random effects of between-child variation within a language variety. The papers presented in this special session will advance theories of grammatical acquisition and applications in the field of child language disorders.

Sánchez in LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet on Friday, 12/4, at 12:20 in ILC N451. Everyone is welcome! Covadonga Sánchez will present "Experimental ideas for the elicitation of subject focus in L2 Spanish.''

Tom and Jeremy at Jackson Street School

Jeremy Hartman and Tom Roeper will make a presentation at “Science Night" at the Jackson Street School on November 19th. There talk will be on acquisition and psycholinguistics.

UMass at BUCLD

The Fortieth meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language Development happened over this weekend, and UMass was represented by:

Mike Clauss and Jeremy Hartman gave the paper “Syntactic cues in adjective learning"

Elliott Moreton gave the talk “Phonological pattern learning involves both implicit and explicit processes” with K. Pertsova.

Amy Schafer gave the poster “Mapping prosody to reference in L2” with A. Takda, H. Rohde and T. Grüter.

Tom Roeper, Anca Sevecenco and Barbara Pearson gave the poster “The acquisition of recursive locative prepositional phrases and relative clauses in child English.”

UUSLAW on Saturday

Smith College will host the “University of Massachusetts, University of Connecticut and Smith College Language Acquisition Workshop” (UUSLAW) on Saturday, November 7. The talks, below, will be in McConnell Hall 103. 

9.30am  Coffee, tea and bagels  Foyer of McConnell

10 am Andie Faber (U.Mass) “Assigning and incorporating grammatical gender in L1 and L2 speakers of gendered languages”

10.40am Emma Nguyen (U.Conn)  "Some thoughts on English-speaking children's comprehension of long passives"

11.20am Ryosuke Hattori  (U.Conn) "On The Majority Influence in English-Chinese Japanese Trilingual Acquisition"

11.50pm Mantoa Smouse (UCT, visiting Smith) “The Acquisition of Disjoint Morphemes in isiXhosa”

12.30-2 Lunch break (we will provide, but other options available locally!) Foyer of McConnell

2pm Kadir Gökgöz  (U.Conn) "IX arguments in code-blending: asymmetries between subjects and objects"

2.30pm Meghan Armstrong (U. Mass) “Catalan-speaking children's multimodal perception of disbelief”

3.10pm Vanessa Petroj  (U. Conn) "Article Distribution in English-ASL Code-blended Whispered Speech"

3:50pm tea break  Foyer of McConnell

4.10pm Renato Lacerda (U.Conn) "Contrastive topicalization in early English: initial questions"

4.40pm Michael Clauss, Tom Roeper and Barbara Pearson (U.Mass)  “Examining restrictiveness and the semantic correlates of recursion”

Armstrong in LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday, 10/30 at 12pm in N451. All are welcome! Meghan Armstrong will present a talk titled: "Tasks for eliciting expressive prosody in mother-child dyads"

Roeper in India

Tom Roeper gave a keynote talk at the Thirty-Seventh International Conference of Linguistic Society of India, hosted by the Centre of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi last week.  The title of his talk was “Recursion: from theory to acquisition in cross-linguistic Perspective.” He also gave a two week workshop on connecting acquisition experiments to fieldwork on newly researched Northern Indian languages. Tom is a guest at the Institute for Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he is also giving a lecture entitled “Strict Interfaces: Why modern theories of UG entail greater Innateness."

Jill de Villiers presents at LARC

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday, Oct. 23, at noon in ILC N451 to hear Jill de Villiers present: “How to make a child language assessment in a language with no history of assessments (or even research); some lessons learned.” All are welcome!

Clauss at MIT

Mike Clauss gives a talk at the Acquisition Lab at MIT Wednesday, Oct. 21, where he will present “Classifying Adjectives without Semantic Information," joint work with Jeremy Hatrman.

Jarosz speaks at LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday 9/25 at 12PM in N451. All are welcome! Gaja Jarosz will present:

Acquisition of Onset Clusters in Polish: Sonority Sequencing and Input Sensitivity