Children's understanding of tense and aspect markers

When and how do children understand tense and aspect markers in their language, which are used to indicate temporal information about events? Prior work has found that children as young comprehend tense and aspect markers in finite clauses as young as age 2. However, in nonfinite clauses, tense is not overt—can children still determine the timing of the event for past-oriented sentences with perfect aspect (e.g., I expect him to have gone down the slide) or future-oriented sentences with embedded bare infinitives (e.g., I expect him to go down the slide)? Our results suggest that 4-year-olds show some understanding of past and future reference across both finite and nonfinite embedded clauses. We are currently running a study with 3- and 4-year-olds to examine how robust this knowledge is. If children are able to understand tense/aspect markers in both finite and nonfinite clauses, it is plausible that they could use temporal orientation to help acquire the meanings of modals (van Dooren et al., 2022) and attitude verbs (see below).

With William Zumchak, Valentine Hacquard, and Jeff Lidz

Poster presented at BUCLD 50

Temporal orientation and the acquisition of attitude verbs

How do children figure out the meanings of attitude verbs such as want and know, which describe non-transparent mental states? Previous work has suggested that children could use pragmatic-syntactic bootstrapping to acquire the split between desire verbs (want, need, try—preferential attitudes) and belief verbs (know, think—representational attitudes). However, some languages, such as European Portuguese, do not seem to show such reliable syntactic differences between belief verbs and desire verbs. This project therefore aims to examine another possible source of evidence learners could draw on: temporal orientation, which has also been suggested to be key to the acquisition of root and epistemic modals (van Dooren et al., 2022). A rich formal literature has observed that desire verbs are typically future-oriented, while belief verbs can be non-future-oriented (Condoravdi, 2002; Klecha, 2016). We are currently examining a corpus of child-directed speech in English to ask (1) whether temporal orientation tracks the belief/desire split in children’s input and (2) whether surface temporal-aspectual features, which are more directly observable by a learner, correlate with temporal orientation. Our preliminary results suggest that desire verbs are indeed strongly associated with future temporal orientation, and that non-future temporal orientation tracks representationality. Surface temporal-aspectual features such as tense and aspect correlate reliably with temporal orientation, but they would likely only be transparent to a learner in finite contexts. Overall, sensitivity to temporal orientation appears to be a promising strategy in acquiring the belief/desire split, but it may need to combine with other syntactic and pragmatic cues to support attitude verb learning.

With Alice Jesus, Valentine Hacquard, and Jeff Lidz

Poster presented at BUCLD 50

Poster presented at MACSIM 10

Infants' understanding of clause types and speech acts

In this project, we are interested in when and how children acquire the basic clause types of their language (declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives) and the speech acts they are most commonly associated with (assertions, questions, and requests). Languages differ widely in the syntactic properties they associate with different clause types, yet somehow infants appear to know the mappings between basic clause types and their canonical speech acts by age 3 (and, we suspect, well before this). We are investigating when this mapping is in place through experimental studies, as well as using corpus analyses to examine how infants may make use of pragmatic information to figure out the alignment between clause types and speech acts.

With Daniel Goodhue, Valentine Hacquard, and Jeff Lidz

Children's understanding of connectives

For my master’s thesis, I examined preschoolers' real-time processing and comprehension of the connectives so and but. Although children produce these connectives by age 3, previous work has found that their comprehension of connectives is not adult-like until surprisingly late—age 7 or later. They seem to particularly struggle with making adult-like contrastive inferences from sentences containing but. This project used eye-tracking to look at how French-speaking preschool children understood connectives in real time, and also examined executive function (specifically cognitive control) and socioeconomic status as possible contributing factors to children’s struggles with but. We found that preschoolers were sensitive to the difference between but and so both during processing and in their explicit interpretations of novel words, and that they sometimes made contrastive inferences using but, but this effect was much less robust than for adults. We did not see clear evidence of executive function effects. However, there was an effect of socioeconomic status, which may be related to how much literary language children are exposed to. Contrastive inferences appeared to be effortful, even for adults, which may suggest that preschoolers have difficulty identifying the specific dimension of contrast associated with but in a given situation.

With Alex de Carvalho and Hugh Rabagliati

Paper in proceedings of BUCLD 48

Poster presented at SALT 34

Syntactic adaptation and word learning

In this project, which was a follow-up to Havron et al. (2019), we examined whether children could adapt to an individual’s use of syntax (“The girls [Verb]” vs. “The girls’ [Noun]”) and use their updated expectations to guide novel word learning. The original study was done in French, and we replicated the results with French-speaking adults and also found evidence that English-speaking children and adults displayed syntactic adaptation and used it to guide word learning. We collected our adult data using Webgazer, an online eye-tracking software, thus demonstrating that it could be used to carry out remote eye-tracking data collection in preferential looking tasks. This is potentially a valuable tool for psycholinguists who wish to lower barriers to recruitment and reach more diverse samples of participants.

With Judith Degen and Michael C. Frank

Article published in Language Development Research

Outcomes of multilingual students

Previously, I have collaborated with researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education to study the academic, linguistic, and psychological trajectories of multilingual students. These projects were carried out through research-practice partnerships with schools in the Bay Area. We have found that students originally classified as English Learners who complete a dual language immersion program achieve at higher levels than English Learners who do not participate in such a program. We have also found that students who participate in language immersion programs tend to continue with their study of the language, and succeed academically at comparable or higher levels than peers who do not participate in a language immersion program.

With Amado Padilla, Xinjie Chen, and Margaret Peterson