Experimental Syntax Lab

The lab goes to CUNY 2013!

2013-03-21T18:51:00.001-07:00

The CUNY 2013 presentation by Grant Goodall is available for download:

New Evidence on D-linking. Poster presented at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 22, 2013.

And while we're at it, here are some lab presentations from CUNY 2011 and 2012:

Do Resumptive Pronouns Ever Rescue Illicit Gaps in English? Poster presented by Bethany Keffala and Grant Goodall at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, 2011.

(Adjunct) Islands and the Finiteness Effect. Paper presented Dan Michel and Grant Goodall at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 14, 2012.

Winter quarter lab meetings

2013-02-07T18:55:00.002-08:00

Lab meetings this quarter are Fridays, 12:30 - 1:30. Here is the tentative list of topics (this will be updated as the quarter proceeds):

Week 2 Jan 18

Orfitelli, R., & Polinsky, M. When performance masquerades as comprehension: Assessing grammaticality in non-L1 populations. (manuscript)
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mpolinsky/files/for_collegues__assessing_grammaticality_in_non-l1_populations-4.pdf

Week 4 Feb 1

Boyoung on testing for island effects in Korean

Week 5 Feb 8

Bermel, Neil and Knittl, Luděk (2012). Corpus frequency and acceptability judgments: A study of morphosyntactic variants in Czech. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Volume 8, Issue 2, Pages 241–275

https://clearing.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.220190!/file/Bermel-Knittl_Frequency-and-Acceptability.pdf

Week 6 Feb 15

Granena, G., & Long, M. H. (2012). Age of onset, length of residence, language aptitude, and ultimate L2 attainment in three linguistic domains. Second Language Research
http://slr.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/12/04/0267658312461497.full.pdf

Week 7 Feb 22
Grant: Preview of CUNY conference posterWeek 8 Mar 1
Open House

Week 9 Mar 8
Bethany and Grant: Preview of Linguistic Evidence conference talk

Week 10 Mar 15
Possible faculty meeting (lab meeting may need to be cancelled)

More photos from GLOW in Asia IX!

2012-11-10T22:35:00.004-08:00

Thanks to the diligent photographers at GLOW in Asia IX (in September at Mie University, Japan), we now have an almost minute-by-minute photo record of Dan Michel and Grant Goodall's presentation on "Finiteness and the nature of island constraints".

Grant Goodall laying the groundwork.

The talk begins!

Grant Goodall explaining a crucial point.

The talk concludes!

Akira Watanabe (Univ. of Tokyo) asks a question.

Mamoru Saito (Nanzan Univ.), Grant's old office-mate from MIT days.

William Snyder (Univ. of Connecticut) asks a question.

Satoshi Tomioka (Univ. of Delaware) asks a question.

Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin) asks a question.

Anders Holmberg (Newcastle) asks a question.

Grant Goodall asks a question (at someone else's talk).

Fall quarter lab meetings

2012-10-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

Lab meetings this quarter are Thursdays, 1:00 - 2:00. Here is the tentative list of topics (this will be updated as the quarter proceeds):

Week 2 Oct 11

Christensen, Ken, Kizach, Johannes Nyvad, Anne (2012). Escape from the Island: Grammaticality and (Reduced) Acceptability of wh-island Violations in Danish. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/w4p548q470n9q112/

Week 3 Oct 18

Chung-hye Han et al. (2012). Processing Strategies and Resumptive Pronouns in English.

WCCFL Proceedings 2012.

http://www.sfu.ca/~ega5/wccfl30-resumption.pdf

Week 4 Oct 25
Emily's tutorial on using WebExp and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Week 5 Nov 1

Philip Hofmeister, Laura Staum Casasanto, Ivan A. Sag (2012)..How do individual cognitive differences relate to acceptability judgments?: A reply to Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips.

Language, Volume 88, Number 2, June 2012, pp. 390-400.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language/v088/88.2.hofmeister.html

Jon Sprouse, Matt Wagers, Colin Phillips (2012). Working-memory capacity and island effects: A reminder of the issues and the facts.Language, Volume 88, Number 2, June 2012, pp. 401-407

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language/v088/88.1.sprouse.html

Philip Hofmeister, Laura Staum Casasanto, Ivan A. Sag (2012). Misapplying working-memory tests: A reductio ad absurdum. Language, Volume 88, Number 2, June 2012, pp. 408-409

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language/v088/88.2.hofmeister01.html

Week 6 Nov 8
Jantien Donkers, John C. J. Hoeks & Laurie A. Stowe (2011): D-linking or set-restriction? Processing Which-questions in Dutch. Language and Cognitive Processes
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01690965.2011.566343

Week 7 Nov 15
Fun with abstracts!

Week 8 Nov 22
No meeting (Thanksgiving)

Week 9 Nov 29
Emily on frequency and acceptability.

Week 10 Dec 6
Dan's practice LSA talk.

Lab goes to GLOW in Asia IX!

2012-10-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

Dan Michel and Grant Goodall's presentation on "Finiteness and the nature of island constraints" was part of the Workshop on Experimental Linguistics at the GLOW in Asia IX conference, held at Mie University, Japan, Sept. 3-6, 2012.

Participants came from all over Asia, Europe and the Americas to hear about finiteness and the nature of island constraints (among other things).

Hajime Ono, Grant's former star student and now Associate Professor at Kinki Univ. in Osaka.

Linguists (in background) undergo ritual purification at conclusion of conference.

Magnitude Estimation! Acquisition! Satiation!

2012-05-24T16:00:00.001-07:00

Some lab publications that have appeared recently:

● About Magnitude Estimation
Shin Fukuda, Grant Goodall, Dan Michel, and Henry Beecher (2012). Is Magnitude Estimation Worth the Trouble? In Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, edited by Jaehoon Choi, E. Alan Hogue, Jeffrey Punske, Deniz Tat, Jessamyn Schertz, and Alex Trueman, pp. 328-336.
http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/29/abstract2718.html

● About Second Language Acquisition
Boyoung Kim and Grant Goodall (2011). Age-Related Effects on Constraints on Wh-movement. In Proceedings of the 11th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2011), edited by Julia Herschensohn and Darren Tanner, pp. 54-62.
http://www.lingref.com/cpp/gasla/11/abstract2545.html

● About satiation

Grant Goodall (2011). Syntactic Satiation and the Inversion Effect in English and Spanish Wh-Questions. Syntax, 14: 29–47.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9612.2010.00148.x/abstract

Spring Quarter lab meetings

2012-04-09T09:43:00.002-07:00

Lab meetings this quarter are Tuesdays, 12:30 - 2:00. Here is the tentative list of topics (this will be updated as the quarter proceeds):

Week 2 Apr 10

Phillips, C. (in press). On the nature of island constraints. I: Language processing and reductionist accounts.

http://ling.umd.edu/~colin/research/papers/phillips2012_islands1.pdf

Week 3 Apr 17
Phillips, C. (in press.) On the nature of island effects. II: Language learning and innateness.
http://ling.umd.edu/~colin/research/papers/phillips2012_islands2.pdf

Week 4 Apr 24
Omaki, A. & Schulz, B. (2011). Filler-gap dependencies and island constraints in second language processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33, 563-‐588.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&pdftype=1&fid=8433678&jid=SLA&volumeId=33&issueId=04&aid=8433676

Week 5 May 1
Polinsky, M, Clemens LE, Morgan AM, Xiang M, Heestand D. In Press. Resumption in English.
http://scholar.harvard.edu/mpolinsky/files/sprouse_paper_latest.082911.pdf

Week 6 May 8
Sprouse, J., Fukuda, S., Ono, H. and Kluender, R. (2011), Reverse Island Effects and the Backward Search for a Licensor in Multiple Wh-Questions. Syntax, 14: 179–203.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9612.2011.00153.x/pdf

Week 7 May 15
Crawford, J. (2011). Using syntactic satiation to investigate subject islands. 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 29).
http://s93493490.onlinehome.us/CrawfordWCCFL.pdf

Week 8 May 22
Francom, J. (2009). Experimental Syntax: Exploring the effect of repeated exposure to anomalous syntactic structure. University of Arizona Ph.D. dissertation. Chapter 3.

Week 9 May 29
Grant on a template for web-based acceptability experiments.

Week 10 June 5
Boyoung on islands in Korean-English bilinguals.

Dan and Grant's CUNY 2012 presentation

2012-03-18T16:08:00.001-07:00

The CUNY 2012 presentation by Dan Michel and Grant Goodall is now available for download:

(Adjunct) Islands and the Finiteness Effect. Paper presented at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 14, 2012.

Photos from CUNY 2012 conference

2012-03-18T15:48:00.001-07:00

Dan Michel presenting his poster on similarity-based interference in long-distance dependencies.

The Empire State Building (across the street from the conference venue) at dusk.

Noam Chomsky speaking on "core contested concepts".

Dan Michel, alum Kate Davidson Zaremba, Gabe Doyle, and Rodolfo Mata (not visible, but being spoken to on phone). This is right after back-to-back talks by Noam Chomsky and Colin Phillips, and Gabe's bag appears to be radioactive. Not sure what that means.

Daffodils and non-eucalyptus trees in Central Park.

The lab goes to CUNY!

2012-02-22T17:57:00.001-08:00

Two current lab projects will be presented at this year's CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing:

Dan Michel and Grant Goodall ▪ Adjunct islands and the finiteness effect [Papers, March 14]
Dan Michel ▪ Long-distance dependencies and content-addressable working memory [Poster Session 1]

Check out also the following poster, which Gabe Doyle gave us a preview of at a recent lab meeting:

Gabriel Doyle and Roger Levy ▪ Conceptual noise induces structural uncertainty during sentence processing

Full information on this conference is at http://cuny2012.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ .

Winter Quarter lab meetings

2012-01-20T16:24:00.000-08:00

Here is the tentative list of presentations/discussion topics for this quarter:

Week    Date
   2        Jan 18     Simone

   3        Jan 25     Pearl & Sprouse: Syntactic Islands without UG (part 1)
                http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/papers/PearlSprouse2011Manu_UGIslands.pdf

   4        Feb 1       Pearl & Sprouse: Syntactic Islands without UG (part 2)

   5        Feb 8       Gabe

   6        Feb 15      Koizumi, Masatoshi, and Katsuo Tamaoka. 2010. Psycholinguistic evidence for the VP-internal subject position in Japanese. Linguistic Inquiry 41, 663-680.

   7        Feb 22      Rodolfo

   8        Feb 29       Jesse Snedeker & Elizabeth Casserly (2010): Is it all relative? Effects of prosodic boundaries on the comprehension and production of attachment ambiguities, Language and Cognitive Processes, 25:7-9, 1234-1264

   9        Mar 7         Dan and Grant: Practice CUNY talk

   10      Mar 14       No meeting this week (CUNY conference)

Dan Michel presents at LSA

2012-01-06T21:48:00.000-08:00

Dan Michel is one of many UCSD students, faculty and alums presenting at this year's Linguistic Society of America meeting in Portland. His paper, based on ongoing research of his in the lab, is entitled "Content-addressable working memory and the grammar-processing island debate."

Fall conference presentations

2012-01-06T21:37:00.000-08:00

Here are some of our presentations on experimental syntax topics from the past few months:

Grant Goodall: "¿Para qué sirve la sintaxis experimental?" Universidad de Costa Rica, Programa de Posgrado en Lingüistica, Nov. 2, 2011.

Boyoung Kim: "Processing Relative Clauses in Heritage Korean." Boston University Conference on Language Development, Nov. 4-6, 2011.

Dan Michel: "Individual differences inform the syntax-processing island debate." Islands in Contemporary Linguistic Theory, Universidad del País Vasco, Spain, Nov. 16-18, 2011.

Dan Michel and Grant Goodall: "Finiteness effects in adjunct islands." Islands in Contemporary Linguistic Theory, Universidad del País Vasco, Spain, Nov. 16-18, 2011.

Fall Quarter lab meetings

2011-10-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

Here is the tentative list of meeting topics for the quarter. Meetings are scheduled for Tuesday at 1:00 (with the option of using Thursday at 1:00 instead if that's better in a given week).

Week Date Topic
2        10/4    Gibson E., Piantadosi, S. and Fedorenko, K. (2011). Using Mechanical Turk to obtain and analyze English acceptability judgments. Language and Linguistics Compass 5(8), 509- 524.

3        10/11   Bader, Markus. and Jana Häussler. (2010). Toward a model of grammatical judgments. Journal of Linguistics 46: 273-330.

4        10/18   Sprouse, Jon, Carson T. Schütze, & Diogo Almeida. Assessing the reliability of journal data in syntax: Linguistic Inquiry 2001-2010.

5    10/25   Boyoung: BU practice poster

6    11/1    no meeting

7    11/8    Dan: Practice Spain talk

8    11/15   Skopeteas, S., Fanselow, G., Focus and the exclusion of alternatives: On the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference. Lingua(2011),

9    11/22   Ryan: Mini-presentation on recent ASL research

10        11/29 no meeting

11        12/6    Simone: Update on experiments

The lab hits the road: Photos from spring conferences

2011-09-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

Shin Fukuda speaks the truth about response methods at WCCFL, held in April at Univ. of Arizona, in joint paper with Dan Michel, Henry Beecher and Grant Goodall.

Non-eucalyptus tress on the beautiful Indiana U. campus, where Grant Goodall gave a talk in April.

Boyoung Kim tells the world about islands in L2 at GASLA, held at UW in March.

Boyoung Kim and Grant Goodall enjoying the cherry blossoms at Univ. of Washington for GASLA (photo by Alejandro Cuza).

Bethany Keffala explaining resumptive pronouns to the crowds at the CUNY Conference.

Bethany Keffala at the CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, held at Stanford in March.

The UT Arlington campus was plastered with posters about experimental syntax in preparation for their annual Student Conference, where Grant Goodall was keynote speaker.

Grant Goodall delivers the keynote address at UT Arlington. (Photo by Namrata Dubey)

Q+A time at UT Arlington for Grant Goodall. (Photo by Namrata Dubey)

Grant Goodall and Jeff Witzel (UT Arlington) talk shop. (Photo by Namrata Dubey)

Spring Quarter lab meetings

2011-09-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

Here is a summary of the lab meeting topics for Spring Quarter:

Week Date Topic

2 Apr 5 Sprouse & Almeida: "A Quantitative Defense of Linguistic Methodology"

3 Apr 12 Dan Michel on some of his upcoming experiments

4 Apr 19 WCCFL practice talk (Shin, Dan, Henry and Grant)

5 Apr 26 Cancelled.

6 May 3 Philip Hofmeister on "Understanding acceptability judgments:

distinguishing between effects of grammar and processing"

7 May 10 Dave Hall on present perfect in temporal clauses

8 May 17 Dan Michel on his recent work on adjuncts

9 May 24 Crawford: "Syntactic Satiation of Subject Islands"

10 May 31 Final meeting: Snacks and conversation

Spring conference presentations

2011-03-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

Some upcoming presentations on lab research projects:

Shin Fukuda, Dan Michel, Grant Goodall & Henry Beecher: "Is Magnitude Estimation Worth the Trouble?"
29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Univ. of Arizona, April 22-24

Grant Goodall: "Experimental explorations of ECP and island effects"
Indiana University , Dept. of Linguistics Colloquium, April 4

Boyoung Kim & Grant Goodall: "Age-related Effects on Constraints on Wh-movement"
11th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference, Univ. of Washington, March 25-27, 2011

Bethany Keffala & Grant Goodall: "Do resumptive pronouns ever rescue illicit gaps in English?"
CUNY 2011: Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Stanford Univ., March 24-26, 2011

Grant Goodall: "What is experimental syntax good for?"
18th Annual University of Texas at Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics, March 3-4, 2011

Meeting topics for rest of Winter Quarter

2011-01-20T15:24:00.000-08:00

Here is the schedule of discussion topics for lab meetings in the rest of Winter Quarter:

Week Date Topic

4 Jan 24 DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay & Ravid article on age effects in SLA

5 Jan 31 Sprouse article on magnitude estimation

6 Feb 7 Emily Morgan will discuss her satiation project

7 Feb 14 Casasanto, Hofmeister & Sag article on additivity

9 Feb 28 Sprouse, Wagers & Philips article on working memory and islands

10 Mar 7 Sprouse & Almeida article on linguistic methodology

All meetings are at 10:00am.

Winter Quarter lab meetings

2011-01-05T11:02:00.000-08:00

Lab meetings this quarter will take place on Mondays at 10am. Our first reading for discussion will be:

Heestand, Dustin, Ming Xiang, and Maria Polinsky. 2011. Resumption still does not rescue islands. Linguistic Inquiry.

Upcoming conference presentations

2011-01-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

Here are some conference presentations by lab members that will occur in the near future:

LSA Annual Meeting (Pittsburgh), January:
Boyoung Kim: Long-distance Wh-movement in L2 English: An experimental study of gradience in acceptability

Berkeley Linguistics Society, February:
Bethany Keffala: Resumption in English: Relative Acceptability Creates an Illusion of ‘Saving’

Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (Seattle), March:
Boyoung Kim and Grant Goodall: Age-related Effects on Constraints on Wh-movement

18th Annual University of Texas at Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics, March:
Grant Goodall (keynote address): What is Experimental Syntax Good for?

Meetings for rest of Fall Quarter

2010-11-19T10:15:00.000-08:00

We will have two more meetings this quarter (Tuesdays at 10 in the lab):

Nov. 23: Grant Goodall will talk about sub-extraction from subjects and fronted wh-phrases.

Nov. 30: Bethany Keffala will talk about resumptive pronouns in English.

Fukuda, Michel, Beecher & Goodall (2010) on-line

2010-11-11T13:03:00.000-08:00

The presentation by Shin Fukuda, Dan Michel, Henry Beecher and Grant Goodall at last January's LSA ("Comparing Three Methods for Sentence Judgment Experiments") is available at http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~goodall/lsa2010.pdf

Fall conference season

2010-11-08T08:28:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the lab-related projects presented at conferences this fall:

Isolation of Independent Processing Factors in Negative Island Contexts
Simone Gieselman, Robert Kluender, Ivano Caponigro

NELS 41 at Penn

Subject-verb inversion and verb finiteness are independent in Spanish

Grant Goodall with John Grinstead and Mariana Vega-Mendoza of Ohio State

Boston University Conference on Language Development

and Hispanic Linguistics Symposium at Indiana University

L2 wh-movement: that-trace and island effects

Boyoung Kim

WECOL at CSU Fresno

Processing factor in negative island contexts

Simone Gieselman, Robert Kluender, Ivano Caponigro

WECOL at CSU Fresno

Upcoming talks

2010-10-24T21:18:00.000-07:00

Here is what we have on tap for the next several weeks (Tuesdays at 10:00):

Oct. 26: Grant Goodall on work he has been doing with John Grinstead and Mariana Vega-Mendoza on wh-questions in child Spanish.

Nov. 2: Boyoung Kim will do a practice version of her WECOL talk.

Nov. 9: Kate Davidson on using experimental syntax techniques for getting pragmatic judgments.

Nov. 16: Discussion of "The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research" by Edward Gibson & Evelina Fedorenko.

Nov. 23: open

Nov. 30: Bethany Keffala on resumptive pronouns.

Simone Gieselman on negative islands

2010-10-15T21:12:00.000-07:00

We will meet on Monday, Oct. 18, at noon to hear a practice version of Simone's upcoming NELS talk on "Isolation of Independent Processing Factors in Negative Island Contexts".

See you then! And if you'd like to present a practice talk of your own (or just present results of work in progress), let me know.