BUCLD 30 extra credit and recommendations
The Boston University Conference on Language Development is almost upon us, so I wanted to outline the extra credit opportunity that is available, and make some suggestions about talks/posters that might relate to things we’ve been talking about in the class.
Extra credit. If you go to the BUCLD (which you can do for free if you volunteer a small amount of your time), write a short (1 page) summary each for two different talks, outlining what you understood the talk to be about (what they proposed, what data they looked at, what conclusions they drew). I’ll take that and substitute it for your second-lowest homework grade (your lowest one will be dropped anyway).
Recommendations. There are a number of talks that relate to the acquisition of syntax, although in several of them, they will be assuming a bit more background knowledge than we’ll have gotten by then. The talks below are the ones that I think are most likely to be both mostly-comprehensible given what we’ve talked about and about syntax. I’ll try to say a couple of words in class about these right before the conference, too (to tell you briefly what “root infinitives” are, what some of the issues are with question formation, passives, phases, SLI, etc.).
Friday, Nov. 4
- 9:30am. Brun, Babyonyshev. Aspectual properties of root infinitive verbs in child Russian
- 10:00am. Rus, Chandra. Child language imperatives: Questioning the “imperative as an RI-analogue” hypothesis
- 11:45am. Viau. Give = CAUSE + HAVE/GO: Evidence for early lexical decomposition of dative verbs in English child corpora
Saturday Nov 5
- 11:15am. Grebenyova. Multiple interrogatives in child language
- 2:30pm. Babyonyshev, Hart, Gigorenko. The acquisition of passives by Russian-speaking children with SLI
- 3:00pm. Perovic, Wexler. New data on passives in Williams syndrome: Evidence for a grammatical delay
- 4:30pm. Gavarró, Torrens. Participle agreement in Catalan and Spanish and some of its implications
- 5:00pm. Hyams, Snyder. Reflexive clitics and the Universal Phase Requirement
Sunday, Nov 6.
- 9:30am. Hirsch, Wexler. By the way, children don’t know “by”
- 11:00am. Schulz. Evidence for wh-scope-marking in advanced Japanese-English interlanguage grammars