Language Acquisition Research Center, Hunter College

Presentation Schedule

We will be presenting some of our recent work at the following conferences:

Upcoming Presentations

Conference	Date	Location
Psycholinguistics Across the Borders	June 24-25, 2010	Rovereto, Italy
Pozzan, L., Bencini, G., & Valian, V. (2010, June). Input and generalization in first and second language acquisition.
Abstract: In this talk, we combine insights and methods from linguistics and psycholinguistics to address fundamental questions in the cognitive science of language. We focus on sentence level generalizations in first and second language learners and use different tasks to examine the role of input frequency and lexical vs. abstract knowledge in child and adult acquisition. To address these questions, we report experimental studies that look at the acquisition of low frequency structures (passives) and complex sentence structures that are know to elicit errors in both first and second language acquisition (main and embedded questions). In the first part of the talk, we use syntactic priming in language production to examine the sentence level representations of young three-year-old monolingual English speakers and show that children primed with passives produced significantly more passives in describing pictures with inanimate participants than did children primed with actives. The priming was genuinely abstract: the materials contained different lexical noun phrases, and verbs, and criteria for counting passives were strict. The results thus argue that young monolingual English children have more abstract sentence level representations than suggested by lexicalist accounts of language acquisition. We then report preliminary data from bilingual children Chinese/English children (ages 5-6), as part of an ongoing extension of our priming paradigm to examine sentence level representations in atypical learners (bilinguals and children with language impairments). The results from our bilingual group will shed light on to the interaction between the amount of prior language experience with low frequency structures and children’s developing representations. In the second part of the talk, we use elicited production and magnitude estimation to examine the extent of rule generalization in the acquisition of English main and embedded questions. By comparing advanced adult learners of English with different first language backgrounds, we tease apart the effect of language transfer from more general learning biases in acquisition, while by comparing adult and child learners we focus on the influence of age of acquisition on syntactic development. Our general approach demonstrates how it is possible to integrate theoretical approaches to language with experimental and potential clinical applications, and calls for studies of language representation and processing that take a dynamic comparative approach to the study of language throughout the lifespan.
Poster: Click here
Psycholinguistics Across the Borders	June 24-25, 2010	Rovereto, Italy
Bencini, G., Pozzan, L., Valian, V., & Semenza, C. (2010, June). Language Specific Effects in Alzheimer’s Disease: Subject Omission in Italian and English.
Abstract: In this talk we take a cross-linguistic approach to examine the following questions: How does a native speaker's knowledge of her language’s syntax interact with processing factors such as sentence length and complexity? Conversely, how do general cognitive constraints interact with the grammatical properties of individual languages? We explore these questions by focusing on the linguistic parameter that licenses null subjects in languages like Italian and prohibits them in languages like English (Chomsky, 1981). The contrast between these two types of languages is illustrated in (1). Without an overt third person subject (e.g., she), the English sentence in 1a is ungrammatical, whereas the corresponding Italian sentence is fully grammatical. Languages like Italian are often referred to as null subject languages. In these languages the null subject is pro (pronounced “little pro”) and is assumed to be a phonologically silent, but syntactically present, element with pronominal properties. (1) a. * Walks on the beach b. Cammina sulla spiaggia We used a repetition task to examine the effect of sentence complexity on the production of syntactic subjects by English and Italian speakers with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). By using the same task and matched materials with speakers of languages that contrast minimally on a grammatical property (i.e., obligatoriness of overt subjects), we can tease apart the effects that are due to general repetition ability and those that result from language-specific syntactic properties. In Experiment 1, twelve Italian speakers with AD and twelve age and education-matched controls repeated sentences of varying lenght. As predicted, Italian AD speakers omitted sentence subjects in complex sentences while control participants very rarely did. In Experiment 2, ten English AD speakers, matched with the Italian AD participants with respect to age and severity of the disease, and ten age and education-matched controls repeated translation equivalent-materials. Unlike the Italian AD participants, English AD participants did not omit sentence subjects. Italian and English AD participants, however, were comparable in their overall ability to repeat sentences of varying length. These results indicate that the performance of AD speakers in repeating sentences interacts with language specific properties. We are following up on these studies with a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm of the same materials with healthy English-speaking adults, and plan to extend this work to Italian, to see whether a similar pattern can be induced in healthy subjects once processing resources are taxed.
The Psychonomic Society: Annual Scientific Meeting	November 19-22, 2009	Boston, MA
Knowles, E.R., & Lloyd, M.E. (2009, November). Exploring an Artificial Music Grammar.
Abstract: Recent neuroimaging and behavioral research has suggested a possible overlap in syntax processing mechanisms between music and language (Patel, 2008). Music and language may also share common mechanisms for the learning of syntactical knowledge through statistical probabilities (Saffran, 1999). The present study used an artificial music grammar (Loui & Wessel, 2006) in order to test the ability of non-musician participants to learn a new music grammar as well as to observe a possible interaction between music and language syntax processing. Although participants were able to learn the artificial music grammar, a language task was not affected by errors in the new music grammar as has been found with Western music-syntax errors (Slevc, Rosenberg, & Patel, 2009). Participants may need more exposure to the new music grammar in order gain a more complete representation of the regularities within the grammar.
Second Language Research Forum	October 29-November 1, 2009	East Lansing, MI
Pozzan, L., & Quirk, E. (2009, October). Inversion and non-inversion of main and embedded questions in English SLA.
Abstract: Second language learners of English might fail to perform subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI) in main questions; the source of these errors is contentious and poorly understood. This elicited production study was aimed at determining the effects of L2 input, L1 transfer, and the properties of question type (wh vs. yes/no) and wh-element (what, who, where, why) on SAI in both main and embedded questions. We thus compared advanced learners whose L1s differed (from English and from each other) in terms of wh-movement and SAI: Spanish (which displays SAI in main and embedded questions) and Chinese (which never displays SAI). Moreover, we compared SAI rates for why vs. other wh-words, because why gives rise to low SAI rated in FLA and cross-linguistically. We found a main effect of question type, but no main effect of language and no interaction. Accuracy in main and embedded yes/no questions was at ceiling for both L2-groups. Target-like inversion in main wh-questions was 94% and 86% for Chinese and Spanish speakers, respectively, while non-target inversion was 22% in embedded wh-questions for both groups. As predicted, 63% SAI errors in main wh-questions occurred with why. SAI errors are not due to L1 transfer, as indicated by the lack of a main effect of L1on SAI, and cannot be imputed solely to the L2 input: learners treat question types (yes/no vs. wh) and wh-elements (e.g. why) differently, as indicated by the main effects of question type and with wh-type, although the L2 input doesn’t provide evidence for such distinctions. We argue that SAI errors in embedded questions are due to generalization of SAI from main to embedded contexts. However, SAI does not apply to yes/no questions, similarly to non-standard varieties of English (Hiberno, AAE), where the presence of if in C⁰ blocks SAI.
Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA) 2009	September 11, 2009	Lisbon, Portugal
Pozzan, L., & Quirk, E. (2009, September). Main and Embedded Questions in English SLA.
Poster: Click here Abstract: Click here