Speakers: Keely New, Premvanti Patel, Giovanni Roversi, Kate Kinnaird, Athulya Aravind (MIT)
Title: BUCLD Practice Talks
Time: Thursday, October 26th, 12:30pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
How toddlers answer multiple wh-questions (Keely New, Premvanti Patel and Athulya Aravind)
Abstract: The ability to comprehend wh-questions is one that already emerges in infancy. Infants comprehend subject whquestions like “Who ate something?” by 15-months, and distinguish them from object wh-questions like “What did Mom eat?” by 20-months. Adult linguistic competence, however, includes more complex wh-questions like “Who ate what?”, which in turn demand more complex answers. In this work, we investigate 2-and-3-year-olds’ understanding of multiple wh-questions. To do so, we probed their sensitivity to restrictions on which wh-word in a multiple question can be fronted (the “superiority constraint”). Using a novel “fly-in-the-wall” paradigm, which recreates naturalistic parent-child interactions, we elicited responses from toddlers on grammatical and ungrammatical multiple wh-questions, as well as single wh-questions. Toddlers differentiated single and multiple wh-questions, often giving adult-like pair-list responses to the latter. Both groups distinguished between ill-formed and well-formed questions in their response patterns, albeit in different ways.
Acquisition of *ABA paradigms in a child Artificial Language Learning Experiment (Giovanni Roversi, Kate Kinnaird and Athulya Aravind)
Abstract: Across the world’s languages, only certain types of linguistic patterns are attested, while other, equally logically possible patterns appear to be non-existent. Are these gaps accidental or do they in fact reflect biases in our linguistic system? We bring developmental data to bear on this issue. As a concrete case study, we examine irregular adjectival degree paradigms. For example, English has adjectives like good-better-best, and other types of irregular paradigms are known from other languages, but no language seems to have paradigms that would look like goodbetter-goodest. We designed an Artificial Language Learning study to determine whether unattested adjectival paradigms are in fact harder to learn than attested ones. Our preliminary results indicate that children indeed find the unattested paradigms harder to learn than the attested ones. This brings suggestive evidence to the idea that language learning might be constrained in such a way that excludes these paradigms.