Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Laurel Perkins (Department of Linguistics, University of California Los Angeles)

Title: How to grow a grammar: Syntactic development in infancy

Abstract: What we can learn depends on what we already know; a child who can't count cannot learn arithmetic, and a child who can't segment words cannot identify properties of verbs in her language. Language acquisition, like learning in general, is incremental. How do children converge on a grammar for their language using incomplete and noisy representations of their linguistic input?

In this talk, I'll be looking at these questions through the lens of infants' wh-dependency acquisition. I'll present a collection of studies that use behavioral methods to investigate infants' representations of wh-questions, and computational methods to investigate how those representations are acquired. These studies show: (1) that infants in their second year of life represent moved arguments in wh-questions; (2) that their representations of these questions develop, with local argument relations represented before argument movement; and (3) that learners might identify movement dependencies in their language by combining prior syntactic knowledge with smart statistical learning mechanisms. This case study shows how a multifaceted approach, drawing from formal linguistics, developmental psycholinguistics, and computational cognitive modelling, can inform our theories of grammar acquisition in development.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Henry Conklin

Centre for Language Evolution