'Third Man Project'
Do toddlers expect transitive clauses to describe certain kinds of events? What sort? To answer this, we need to know both their perception both of transitive clauses, and of scenes we might describe with them. In this project we engage these questions, and direct our attention on two interesting cases: transitive clauses that might seem to describe their event as having three participants, such as Lee stole the truck, and transitive clauses where the object has been questioned, such as What did Lee steal?.
Grant
Transitivity of Sentences and Scenes in Early Language Development
Members
Jeffrey Lidz, Alexis Wellwood, Angela He, Rachel Dudley, Laurel Perkins, Tyler Knowlton, Mina Hirzel and Jack Ying
Presentations
"Transitive clauses can describe 3-participant events: Evidence against one-to-one matching between arguments and participants in verb learning"
Alexander Williams, Laurel Perkins and Jeffrey Lidz
44th Boston University Conference on Language Development (2019)
"Matching number vs. linking roles: Using 3-participant scene percepts to understand infants' bootstrapping"
Laurel Perkins, Tyler Knowlton, Alexander Williams and Jeffrey Lidz
43rd Boston University Conference on Language Development, poster (2018)
"Getting a grip on infants' event representations: Participant number in TAKE and PICK-UP"
Tyler Knowlton, Laurel Perkins, Alexander Williams and Jeffrey Lidz
International Conference on Infant Studies (2018)
"Linguistic and conceptual structure in verb learning"
Laurel Perkins, Tyler Knowlton, Mina Hirzel, Rachel Dudley, Alexander Williams and Jeffrey Lidz
McDonnell Network Plenary Workshop on “The Ontogenetic Origins of Combinatorial Thought”, UCSD (2017)
"Conceptual correlates of transitivity in early verb learning"
Laurel Perkins, Alexander Williams and Jeffrey Lidz
42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development, talk (2017)
"A new test of one-to-one matching between arguments and participants in verb learning"
Alexander Williams, Laurel Perkins, Angela He, Sirri Björnsdóttir and Jeffrey Lidz
42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development, poster (2017)
"Can intransitive clauses name 2-participant events? A new test of participant-to-argument matching in verb learning"
Laurel Perkins, Angel He, Rachel Dudley, Alexander Williams and Jeffrey Lidz
Workshop at the 29th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference:~Events in Language and Cognition, talk (2016)
"Participant structure in event perception: Towards the acquisition of implicitly 3-place predicates"
Alexis Wellwood, Angela He, Jeffrey Lidz and Alexander Williams. Penn Linguistics Colloquium 38, talk (2014)
"Assessing event perception in adults and prelinguistic children: A prelude to syntactic bootstrapping" Angela He, Alexis Wellwood, Jeffrey Lidz and Alexander Williams
Boston University Conference on Language Development 38, poster (2013)