More Like this

1. A multidimensional perspective on the acquisition of subject-verb dependencies by Haitian-Creole speaking children: Insights from comprehension and production

   https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.22001.bar  

   Barrière, Isabelle; Joseph, Blandine; Aharodnik, Katsiaryna; Kresh, Sarah; Fleurio, Guetjens Prince; Legendre, Géraldine; Nazzi, Thierry (August 2023, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages)

   Abstract The present multidimensional study investigates the acquisition of pronominal subject-verb dependencies in Standard Haitian Creole (HC). A corpus analysis confirms that HC subject pronouns are phonological clitics in the target grammar and that their reduction is optional and unpredictable. The comprehension and production of dependencies involving these subject pronouns in 20 preschoolers acquiring HC as their first language were investigated. While the production of third person singular and plural subject pronouns l(i) and y(o) reveals early mastery of adult constraints on their phonological reductions, the systematic assignments of l(i) to singular subjects vs. y(o) to plural subjects of the verb in the syntactic dependency emerge later, in both production and comprehension. The few syntactic contexts in which HC-learning children show evidence of comprehension involve full forms, rather than phonological reductions. Possible factors that explain these findings include the relative unpredictability of their forms and the linguistic status of HC pronouns. 

   more » « less
2. Gender Competition in the Production of Nonbinary ‘They’

   https://doi.org/10.5070/G60111306  

   Arnold, Jennifer E; Venkatesh, Ranjani; Vig, Zachary (February 2024, Glossa Psycholinguistics)

   Two experiments test how college students use nonbinary they to refer to a single and specific person whose pronouns are they/them, e.g., “Alex played basketball on the neighborhood court. At one point they made a basket,” compared to matched stories about characters with binary (she/her or he/him) pronouns. Experiment 1 shows that for both types of pronouns, people use pronouns more in a one-person than a two-person context. In both experiments, people produce nonbinary they at least as frequently as binary pronouns, suggesting that any difficulty does not result in pronoun avoidance in spoken language, even though it does in written language (Arnold et al., 2022). Nevertheless, there is evidence that nonbinary they is somewhat difficult, in that people made gender errors on about 9% of trials, and they used a more acoustically prominent and disfluent-sounding pronunciation for nonbinary pronouns than binary pronouns. However, exposure  to  they  in  the  context  of  the  experiment  had  no  effect  on  frequency,  accuracy,  or  pronunciation of pronouns. This provides the first evidence of how nonbinary they is used in a naturalistic storytelling context and shows that while it poses some minor difficulties, it can be used successfully in a supportive context.  

   more » « less
3. Repetition Versus Variability in Verb Learning: Sometimes Less Is More

   https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_JSLHR-21-00091  

   Horvath, Sabrina; Arunachalam, Sudha (November 2021, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research)

   Purpose This study examined whether 2-year-olds are better able to acquire novel verb meanings when they appear in varying linguistic contexts, including both content nouns and pronouns, as compared to when the contexts are consistent, including only content nouns. Additionally, differences between typically developing toddlers and late talkers were explored. Method Forty-seven English-acquiring 2-year-olds ( n = 14 late talkers, n = 33 typically developing) saw scenes of actors manipulating objects. These actions were labeled with novel verbs. In the varied condition, children heard sentences containing both content nouns and pronouns (e.g., “The girl is ziffing the truck. She is ziffing it!”). In the consistent condition, children heard the verb an equal number of times, but only with content nouns (e.g., “The girl is ziffing the truck. The girl is ziffing the truck!”). At test, children were shown two new scenes and were asked to find the novel verb's referent. Children's eye gaze was analyzed as a measure of learning. Results Mixed-effects regression analyses revealed that children looked more toward the correct scene in the consistent condition than the varied condition. This difference was more pronounced for late talkers than for typically developing children. Conclusion To acquire an initial representation of a new verb's meaning, children, particularly late talkers, benefit more from hearing the verb in consistent linguistic contexts than in varying contexts. 

   more » « less
4. Projecting Characters' Knowledge from Utterances in Narratives

   Soubki, A; Paige, A; Murzaku, J; Rambo, O; Brennan, S E (March 2025, AAAI)

   When reading narratives, human readers rely on their Theory of Mind (ToM) to infer not only what the characters know from their utterances, but also whether characters are likely to share common ground. As in human conversation, such decisions are not infallible but probabilistic, based on the evidence available in the narrative. By responding on a scale (rather than Yes/No), humans can indicate commitment to their inferences about what characters know (ToM). We use two prompting approaches to explore (i) how well LLM judgments align with human judgments, and (ii) how well LLMs infer the author’s intent from utterances intended to project knowledge in narratives. 

   more » « less
5. Inquiry and Logical Form

   https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.70001  

   Stojnić, Una; Stone, Matthew (September 2025, Philosophical Perspectives)

   ABSTRACT Joint inquiry requires agents to exchange public content about some target domain, which in turn requires them to track which content a linguistic form contributes to a conversation. But, often, the inquiry delivers a necessary truth. For example, if we are inquiring whether a particular bird, Tweety, is a woodpecker, and discover that it is, then our inquiry concluding in this fact would conclude in a necessity, and the form “Tweety is a woodpecker” expresses this necessary truth. Still, whether Tweety is a woodpecker seems a perfectly legitimate object of study, and the answers we accrue can be informative. But the dominant model of inquiry (Stalnaker, 1978, 1984) treats this situation as linguistically deviant, and diagnoses our ignorance and subsequent discovery as metalinguistic: we were ignorant, and ultimately discovered something, about the meaning of our terms. Rather than linguistic deviation, we argue this situation is the norm, and one that calls for an alternative model of inquiry. This paper develops such a model. It shows that to capture how agents can learn something informative about the world—and not merely language—even when inquiry concerns necessary facts, it's key to track how moves in discourse contribute public content onto the conversational record, but also, crucially, how those moves are connected by coherence relations to one another and to real‐world situations they are about. This allows us to capture that utterances contribute determinate, public content, while representing the information states of the interlocutors who may have only partial access to the evidence and content of the conversation, without making their ignorance metalinguistic. It lets us give precise explanations why some discourses can be transparently convincing in the conclusions they underwrite. The model thus precisifies the role of public context and shared content in anchoring an inquiry. It allows for imperfect tracking of linguistic contributions that are binding for how inquiry unfolds, and it allows for an inquiry into the status of necessary truths to be both informative, and involve empirical, rather than metalinguistic, ignorance. 

   more » « less