Experimental Syntax Lab
News, events and commentary from the UCSD Experimental Syntax Lab
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Grant speaks in CRL talk series
Saturday, March 4, 2023
Alex and Maho go to HSP 2023 in Pittsburgh!
The program also has presentations by former labmates Emily Morgan and Shota Momma.
Friday, January 27, 2023
Alex goes CAMPing at UCLA!
Alex RodrÃguez 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.
Tuesday, January 17, 2023
Winter 2023 lab meetings
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.
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"
- 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.
Friday, October 7, 2022
Fall 2022 lab meetings
We will meet this quarter on Fridays at 1:00.
October 7We'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:
October 14Lu, 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
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
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
Monday, September 12, 2022
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
Friday, July 1, 2022
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?).