Winter 2026 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be on Thursdays, 11:00 - 12:20

January 15

We start the new year right with this interesting new article on wh-in-situ in French and Chinese:

Pablos Robles, L., Yang, Y., Doetjes, J., & Cheng, L. L.-S. (2025). Do readers anticipate wh-in-situ questions? Cross-linguistic reading time evidence from Mandarin Chinese and French. Applied Psycholinguistics, 46, e9. Cambridge Core.by the https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716425000074

January 22

The wh-in-situ literature just won't stop! So of course we have to read it.

Lo, C. W., & Brennan, J. R. (2021). EEG correlates of long-distance dependency formation in Mandarin wh-questions. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15, 591613.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.591613

January 29

This week we take a foray into the non-experimental literature with this recent article on phases vs. intervention in accounting for successive cyclicity:

Keine, S., & Zeijlstra, H. (2025). Clause-internal successive cyclicity: Phasality or DP intervention?. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 1119-1182. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09627-3

February 5

This week we'll do quick previews of three experiments in the lab that are about to happen: 

• Scrambling in Korean (Unsub)
• Wh-in-situ in Cantonese (Hugo)
• That-trace in English (Grant and Claire), if time permits

February 12

We'll return to the Keine & Zeijlstra (2025) article this week, looking particularly at the discussion of Dinka and Defaka in the last half of the paper.

February 19

This week we'll talk about this recent article, which argues that "filler-gap" dependencies are actually dependencies between the filler and the head, not a gap:

da Cunha, Y., & Gibson, E. (2025). Syntactic Complexity Phenomena Are Better Explained Without Empty Elements Mediating Long‐Distance Dependencies. Cognitive Science, 49(8), e70088. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/cogs.70088

February 26

Hugo and Unsub will give us previews of their upcoming posters at HSP!  

March 5

Unsub and Grant will each give us sneak peeks at the results from the experiments they've been running this quarter.

March 12

Robert will finish out the quarter with some thoughts on his recent work. 

Fall 2025 lab meetings

 Our meetings this quarter will be on Wednesdays, 12:00 - 1:30

October 8

We'll start the quarter with this recent article on wh-in-situ:

Nozomi Tanaka; Subliminal Island Effects in Japanese Complex NPs with Argument wh-in-situ. Linguistic Inquiry 2025;  https://doi.org/10.1162/LING.a.542

October 15

Can't believe we haven't read this already, but we're catching up:

Pañeda, C., Villata, S., Kush, D. & Sprouse, J., (2024) “A translation-matched, experimental comparison of three types of wh-island effects in Spanish and English”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.11164

October 22

Grant will lead a discussion of "What I did over summer vacation," based on a project that he Ezgi and Claire have been working on over the last several months. We will see (1) some highlights of the major findings of the experiments and some hints of what the theoretical implications might be (though we'll save a deeper discussion of that for another day), (2) what happens when you run exactly the same experiment twice, under different circumstances with two different populations, and (3) a variety of cool analytical tricks you can do once you have the results from almost any experiment.

October 29

We'll discuss this recent article week:

Bruening, Benjamin & Tollan, Rebecca. 2025. Reconstruction in wh movement: the view from lexical reactivation. Syntactic Theory and Research 1.1.4. https://doi.org/10.16995/star.17373.

November 5

Hugo will present a practice talk on Cantonese wh-in-situ that he will be giving soon at CAMP[8].

November 12

We continue our Fall wh-in-situ festival!

Pham, Linh, and Elsi Kaiser. 2025. “Constructing Dependencies With Optional Elements: Insights from Vietnamese”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 10 (1): 5951. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5951.

November 19

We'll discuss a recent article on filler-gap processing in Norwegian:

Kobzeva, A. and Kush, D. 2024. Grammar and expectation in filler-gap dependency resolution: Experimental and modelling evidence from Norwegian. Cognitive Science 48, e13501.

December 3

For our final meeting of the quarter:

Kobzeva, A., Sant, C., Robbins, P.T., Vos, M., Lohndal, T. and Kush, D. 2022. Comparing island effects for different dependency types in Norwegian. Languages 7, 197.

Maho publishes in NLLT!

Maho and Grant just published an open-access article in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory entitled "Relative clauses are islands in Japanese: The case of double relatives". Based on Maho's dissertation work, the article presents a new way of thinking about cross-linguistic variation in island phenomena.

No regular lab meetings in Spring quarter

Grant will be teaching a graduate seminar this quarter where we'll all be reading and discussing articles and presenting research in progress. In short, we'll be doing the sorts of things we usually do in lab meetings, so we won't have lab meetings this quarter unless a special need arises. The topic of the seminar is A'-movement, and it is open to everyone, whether you're enrolled or not!

Winter 2025 lab meetings

 Our meetings this quarter will be Fridays 12:00 - 1:30.

January 17

We'll continue our discussion from last quarter on the upcoming article by Shen and Lim in Syntax about extraction from DPs.

January 24

We'll have a special guest presentation at a special time (11:00): 

"Testing language models’ syntactic sensitivity to grammatical constraints: A case study of wanna contraction"

      Kangsan Noh, Korea University

      Sanghoun Song, Korea University

      Eunjeong Oh, Sangmyung University

February 14

Grant will lead a discussion of "Post-experiment number crunching: how to go from raw results to results that you can begin to interpret".

February 22

We'll discuss this recent NLLT article on extraction out of NPs:

Tollan, R., Doroudiani, B. & Heller, D. Effects of uniqueness on extraction from definite NP objects. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09643-3

February 29

Practice talks for Open House.

March 7

We'll discuss another recent NLLT article, this time on wh-in-situ:

Jin, D., Yan, H. Reassessing the argument–adjunct asymmetry in wh-in-situ islands in Mandarin: An experimental investigation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory  (2024).  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09638-0

March 14

After our break last week, we'll return to this recent NLLT article on wh-in-situ:

Jin, D., Yan, H. Reassessing the argument–adjunct asymmetry in wh-in-situ islands in Mandarin: An experimental investigation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory  (2024).  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09638-0 

Grant named LSA Fellow!

Grant Goodall was named a 2025 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and was honored at a ceremony in January at the Annual Meeting of the LSA in Philadelphia. You can read the full story here. 

CAMP held at UCSD!

 The 7th California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP[7]) was held on our campus on Nov. 16-17 and was a great success.

Hugo Pau presenting a poster

Penny Pan presenting a paper

The weather cooperated very nicely.

Fall 2024 lab meetings

 Our lab meetings this quarter will be (generally) Fridays 12:00 - 1:00.

October 11

Grant will do part 1 of a tutorial on "how to do an acceptability experiment", focusing on stimuli creation and counterbalancing.

October 18

Part 2 of "how to do an acceptability experiment", looking at more counterbalancing, pseudo-randomization, and fillers.

October 25

Part 3 of "how to do an acceptability experiment", with the focus this time on using Qualtrics as a platform for running the experiment. 

November 8

For our meeting this week, Hugo will give us a preview of his CAMP poster exploring D-linking in Cantonese.

November 15

No meeting this week. CAMP[7] starts tomorrow!

November 22

Preliminary discussion of Shen & Lim (in press), "Definite DP island effects across dependency types".

Spring 2024 lab meetings

Our meeting times this quarter will be Thursdays 2:00 - 3:30.

April 11
We'll continue our discussion of the Momma & Dillon response that we started looking at last quarter:

Momma, Shota and Dillon, Brian. Discourse Factors Do Not Explain Islands. 

Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4635713 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4635713

April 18

After our excellent discussion last week, we'll continue our "manner-of-speaking" series with the latest reply from Goldberg, Cuneo and Fergus:

Adele E. Goldberg, Nicole Cuneo, Abigail Fergus. Addressing a challenge to the Backgroundedness account of islands, March 25, 2024. https://osf.io/hmc9n/download/?format=pdf

May 2

This week we'll talk about some current work by Jon Sprouse and Sandra Villata on D-linking and strong/weak islands. The slides from a recent talk of theirs are available here .

May 9

We'll continue our discussion of the Sprouse & Villata slides.

May 16

Since we've been talking about D-linking, we'll continue along those lines with this recent WCCFL poster:

Wh-island effects and d-linking effects in wh-in situ questions

Zheng Shen and Beth Chan, WCCFL 2024

Abstract: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p4GO_HZ-IkpJahTket5RfPB-sADY4KeW/view?usp=sharing

Poster: https://drive.google.com/file/d/152oPbmJEwWaNBGRYbQrvFAE3lXihYEFD/view?usp=sharing

May 23

Grant will show us some work in progress that he has been doing on D-linking.

May 30

We'll discuss this poster on Singapore English that Unsub saw at the recent HSP conference:

Islands for wh-extraction and wh-in-situ are backgrounded in Singlish (but not all backgrounded constructions are islands)

https://osf.io/495nr/

Beth Chan and Zheng Shen

June 6

To finish up the quarter, we'll discuss at least the first part of this recent article:

Christensen, K. R. & Nyvad, A., (2024) “Complexity, frequency, and acceptability”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.10618

 

Winter 2024 lab meetings

 Our meetings this quarter will be Fridays 12:00 - 1:00.

January 19

We'll start off the quarter by discussing this article on Shupamem:

Schurr H, Kandybowicz J, Nchare AL, Bucknor T, Ma X, Markowska M, Tapia A. Absence of Clausal Islands in Shupamem. Languages. 2024; 9(1):7. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9010007

January 26

Maho will give us a tutorial on doing Bayesian analyses of the results of acceptability experiments.

February 2

We'll discuss this article:

Huang, N. Finiteness in a language without finite morphology: An experimental study of Mandarin Chinese. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-023-09591-4

February 9

We'll continue our discussion of the N. Huang article from before, and if there's time, we can start in on this:

Wurmbrand, S. (2024). The Size of Clausal Complements. Annual Review of Linguistics, 10. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031522-103802

March 1

We'll shift gears this week and start in on this recent article:

Cuneo, N., & Goldberg, A. E. (2023). The discourse functions of grammatical constructions explain an enduring syntactic puzzle. Cognition, 240, 105563.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105563

March 8

Continuation of the Cuneo & Goldberg article!

March 15

For our last meeting of the quarter, we'll discuss this reaction to the Cuneo & Goldberg article:

Momma, Shota and Dillon, Brian, Discourse Factors Do Not Explain Islands. 

Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4635713 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4635713

Fall 2023 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be Fridays, 11:30 - 1:00. 

October 13

We'll start the quarter off by reading the following recent article:

Fukuda, S., Ono, H., Tanaka, N., & Sprouse, J. (2023). Re-examining Island Effects with NP-scrambling in Japanese: The Effect of Individual Variation. Japanese/Korean Linguistics 30.

October 27

Continuation of our discussion of the Fukuda et al. article on scrambling in Japanese.

November 3

Seoyeon will give us a progress report on her project about pair-list and functional readings in Korean multiple-wh (echo) questions.

November 17

Unsub will present his work on negative polarity illusions in Korean. 

December 8

Grant will present his recent work on the COMP-trace effect in English.

December 15

Maho will give us a preview of her upcoming talk at the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP). Maho's talk is on scrambling out of relative clauses in Japanese and its relation to presuppositionality.

Spring 2023 lab meetings

Grant is on sabbatical this quarter, so we are having meetings only occasionally.

April 14
Duk-Ho will walk us through his recent self-paced reading experiment on adjunct wh-dependencies.

May 19

Yourdanis Sedarous and Savi Namboodiripad, both of Univ. of Michigan, will be our guests this time as they present their recent work on the effects of prosody and cliticization on resumptive pronouns. 

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?). 

Grant's new book

 Grant's latest book, Theory and Experiment in Syntax, has just been published as part of the Routledge Leading Linguists series! The book is primarily a collection of previously published articles, but there are two new pieces: an introduction ("Five themes in the study of syntax") and a new chapter on cross-linguistic variation is island behavior ("D-linking, non-finiteness, and cross-linguistic variation in island phenomena").