LSLT: Jeff Lidz (LING)

LSLT: Upon Reflection. This semester, we've asked presenters to give reflective talks about their most prominent work from the past. How did they understand the question then, and how do they see it now? See the full lineup here! Lunch will be served starting at 12:15. Vegetarian options available. Let us know if you have other dietary restrictions!

This week: Jeff Lidz, Professor of Linguistics

Revisiting “How Input Matters”: Learning, Parsing & Ignoring

Lidz, Gleitman & Gleitman (2003) showed that Kannada-learning 3-year-olds favor syntactic information over morphological information in verb learning and argued that this followed from principles of Universal Grammar that govern how verb meanings relate to their syntax. In this talk, I will reconsider some of the theoretical assumptions that drove this conclusion, working towards a richer theory of how the input does and does not matter in language acquisition.