Grant speaks in CRL talk series

Grant gave a presentation in the weekly talk series at the Center for Research on Language on "What L2 speakers can tell us about filler-gap dependencies." The slides are available here. 

Alex and Maho go to HSP 2023 in Pittsburgh!

The lab will be represented at this year's Human Sentence Processing conference by three posters, one by Alex Rodríguez and two by Maho Takahashi:

• Maho: Island effects persist despite context: The case of double relatives in Japanese
• Maho: Crossed vs. nested dependencies and crosslinguistic variability in islands
• Alex: Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish: Island sensitivity without gaps

The program also has presentations by former labmates Emily Morgan and Shota Momma. 

Alex goes CAMPing at UCLA!

Alex Rodríguez is presenting his recent work on long-distance dependencies in Spanish ("Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish: Island sensitivity without gaps") at the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, to be held at UCLA, Jan. 28-29.

Winter 2023 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be on Tuesdays, 3:00-4:00.

January 17
For our first lab meeting this quarter, Maho will walk us through the results of her latest experiment, which looks at crossed vs. nested dependencies. Her experiment asks whether there is a perceptible effect on acceptability, once all the confounds are controlled for. 

January 24

Alex will give a practice version of his upcoming talk for CAMP (the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (https://sites.google.com/view/camp5-ucla), happening at UCLA next weekend). The talk has to do with the locality constraints on two long-distance dependencies in Spanish: wh-movement and Clitic Left Dislocation (like topicalization, but with a resumptive clitic pronoun). Alex's experimental work suggests that the two sets of constraints are overlapping, but not identical. 

February 14

Our meetings resume this week with a presentation by Seoyeon on an experiment that she is currently preparing on echo questions in Korean, trying to determine whether echo questions with multiple wh-words (e.g. "WHO bought WHAT?") in Korean allow for pair-list and functional answers. This is very much work in progress, so Seoyeon is hoping for lots of suggestions and feedback!

February 21

This week, Alex and Maho will give us previews of their posters for HSP next month:

Maho: "Island effects persist despite context: The case of double relatives in Japanese"

Maho: "Crossed vs. nested dependencies and crosslinguistic variability in islands"

Alex: "Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish: Island sensitivity without gaps"

They can run us through their posters and we can give them feedback both on the content and on the poster design (everybody loves to critique a poster!).

February 28

A doubleheader today:

• Duk-Ho will give us an overview of the "flow" for his planned dissertation. His work over the last couple of years has been on ellipsis (sprouting, in particular) and on strong vs. weak islands, and he will show us the threads that tie these areas together.
• Grant will give us a quick preview of work he is doing on the "P-trace" effect.

March 6 (Monday)

Special Open House edition: Alex, Duk-Ho, and Maho will give prospective students an overview of their work on experimental syntax.

March 21

For our last meeting of the quarter, Maho will walk us through her plans for an upcoming experiment on scrambling in Japanese.

Fall 2022 lab meetings

We will meet this quarter on Fridays at 1:00.

October 7
We'll discuss this recent article:

Tian Q, Park M-K and Yang X (2022) Mandarin Chinese wh-in-situ argument–adjunct asymmetry in island sensitivity: Evidence from a formal judgment study. Front. Psychol. 13:954175.   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.954175

This is a reaction (and rebuttal) to an article that we read last Fall:

Lu, J., Thompson, C. K., & Yoshida, M. (2020). Chinese wh-in-situ and islands: A formal judgment study. Linguistic Inquiry, 51(3), 611-623. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760257/pdf

October 14
We'll talk about this recent article, on the island sensitivity of NP-scrambling in Japanese:

Fukuda, S. & Tanaka, N. & Ono, H. & Sprouse, J., (2022) “An experimental reassessment of complex NP islands with NP-scrambling in Japanese”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5737

October 21

This week we'll discuss Gisbert Fanselow's chapter on grammar and processing in The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax.

October 28

We'll get started this week on our discussion of the Villata & Tabor article that just appeared in Cognition:

Villata, S., & Tabor, W. (2022). A self-organized sentence processing theory of gradience: The case of islands. Cognition, 222, 104943.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027721003668?via%3Dihub

November 4

Continued discussion of the Villata & Tabor article!

November 18

Alex will give us an overview of his recent experiment on CLLD in Spanish.

December 2

For our final lab meeting of the quarter, Duk-Ho will walk us through some preliminary results from his new experiment on extraction of arguments vs. adjuncts. These are usually claimed to be different in certain crucial ways (e.g., all islands block adjunct extraction, but only some islands block argument extraction), but the data are subtle and maybe even suspect, so Duk-Ho has been exploring this topic by means of a formal experiment. 

Duk-Ho's work published in Journal of Linguistics!

Duk-Ho and Grant have a new article in Journal of Linguistics showing that backward sprouting (as in "Though I don't know what, Mary drank on the bus"), is NOT sensitive to islands, contrary to what is often claimed, and is thus different from the wh-dependencies that it superficially resembles. It IS sensitive to the distance of the dependency, however. 

Jung, D., & Goodall, G. (2022). Filler–gap dependencies and the remnant–correlate dependency in backward sprouting: Sensitivity to distance and islands. Journal of Linguistics, 1-21. doi:10.1017/S0022226722000366

 

New article on the that-trace effect!

 Dept. alum Boyoung Kim and Grant Goodall have a new article in Second Language Research (open access!) where they argue that the results of their experiments on L2 English provide crucial new evidence on what causes the "that-trace effect" (the fact that subjects cannot be extracted from embedded that-clauses, as in *Who do you think that __ has arrived?).