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​I'm Yuanfan Ying, a 3rd-year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland - College Park. My advisors are Jeffrey Lidz and Alexander Williams

Broadly, I'm interested in the acquisition of syntax and semantics. My topics of interest include:

1. Transitivity and displaced noun phrases (see project)

Do missing local arguments guide infants in forming non-local dependencies in wh-questions? How do infants represent wh-questions with noticeable gaps (i.e., argument questions) and ones without (i.e., adjunct questions)?

2. Acquiring definite/indefinite articles (see project)

Do children truly overuse "the" as suggested in elicited production studies? Is the-misuse accounted by egocentricity, wrong meanings, pragmatic immaturity, or performance issues? What governs children's choice of determiners in production?

3. Bootstrapping mechanisms for word learning (see project)

Can infants learn a novel transitive verb in non-basic clauses (i.e., object wh-questions where local arguments are missing)?

Currently, I'm looking at whether infants' perception of gaps in wh-questions is driven only by verb-specific knowledge (e.g., "fix" is missing a local argument in "What did Aaron fix _?") or category-general transitivity. Specifically, for the English preposition "with" (a functional element) that requires a local argument in a declarative clause, do infants perceive a gap when 'with' is stranded in an interrogative clause (e.g., "What did Aaron fix the bike with?").

 

For my MA program, I looked at the mechanisms with which infants categorize nouns and verbs using sentence-medial functional morphemes (for the paper, click here).

 

My amazing cohort members at UMD are Clara Cuonzo, Rosa Eun-Kyoung Lee, Imane Bou-Saboun, Leslie Li, Luisa Seguin, and Xinchi Yu

竖版-雁栖湖_看图王.jpg

At a temple near Yanqi Lake, Beijing.
Beijing, 2018.

First time being abroad in a summer volunteering program.
Colombo beach, Sri Lanka, 2015.

I was born in Huangyan (黄岩, literally "yellow stone"), a coastal city in southeast China, and I grew up speaking both Mandarin Chinese and Taizhou Wu Dialect. Taizhou Wu Dialect is phonologically rather different from Mandarin Chinese and has eight tones, so to me, it has always been a fascinating question how learning a dialect might affect children's language development and cognitive abilities.  

Outside of research, I’m passionate about anything that is rhythmic, including music, movies, and poetry. For this very reason, I have always been inspired to experiment with new languages and cultures.

LAST UPDATED: May. 17, 2023

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