Research | Mysite

Research Interest

Syntactic bootstrapping

Processing prepositional object wh-questions

While infants learning English-type languages understand utterances of wh-questions by responding to gaps they observe in the body of the question, it is not well understood as to how general their gap-filling strategy is in tackling different questions. For instance, in terms of

argument questions, the fronted wh-words (what, who) can be a complement required by a verb as in (2) or one required by a preposition as in (3).

(2) What did she open __?

(3) What did she open the box with __?

15-month-olds can use transitive verbs in predicting direct object gaps as in (2). If 15-month-olds correctly respond to a wh-question with preposition stranding, this would suggest that infants’ early disposition to respond to wh-questions is driven by a general role-filling heuristic that is informed by the expected transitivity of categories.

Learning novel transitive verbs in wh-questions

Human languages contain sentences where an argument is displaced from its canonical, thematic position in the predicate, as in wh- questions (e.g., What is Doris going to fix _?) and relatives (e.g., Michael likes the painting that Aaron created _). Surface structures of such could mislead infants into generalizing that the final verb is intransitive, if they perceive only the end of sentences and fail to establish the link between the fronted argument and the embedded predicate (created). How early are infants able to learn a novel transitive verb in sentences involving displaced NPs? What strategies do they employ in identifying these gapped structures?

Language and Theory of Mind (TOM)

Definite phrases in production

English-learning children (age 3-5) have been reported to overuse "the" in elicited production studies, yet comprehension studies show no support for children's incomplete knowledge for "the". Is there systematic misuse of "the" in children's natural production? Could the alleged overuse be due to experimental artifacts? We conducted a corpus study and a determiner-guessing study and found no clear evidence for the-overuse. We will launch a production study to probe determiner choice in children and address the puzzle.

Prosody-functor bootstrapping

Master's project: Before coming to UMD, I studied linguistics at Tsinghua University, where I was a member of Xiaolu Yang's Language Acquisition Lab. In collaboration with Rushen Shi at Université du Québec à Montréal, we looked at Mandarin-learning 19-month-olds' use of utterance-medial functional morphemes (a in XaY sequences) for classifying preceding words (X) as nouns or verbs. We found initial evidence for how phrase boundaries might help toddlers resolve distributional uncertainties and succeed in syntactic categorization. My thesis is available here.

Besides, I have also dabbled in areas including non-adjacent dependency, unergative vs. unaccusative verbs, control sentences, classifier-noun agreement, and wh- questions.