An important aspect of language processing is the comprehender's ability to determine temporal relations between an event denoted by a verb and events already established in the discourse. This often requires the tense of a verb to be evaluated in relation to specific temporal discourse properties. W e investigate the time course of this process by examining how the temporal properties of a discourse influence the initial processing of temporarily ambiguous reduced relative clauses. M u c h of tfie empirical work on the reading of reduced relative clauses has revealed that readers experience a large mis-analysis effect (or *gardenpatfi') in reduced relatives like "The student spotted bv the proctor received a warning" because the reader has initially interpreted the verb "spotted" as a past tense verb in a main clause. Recent results from an eye movement study are provided which irnlicate that this mis-analysis of relative clauses can be eliminated when the temporal constraints of a discourse do not easily permit a main clause past tense interpretation. Such a flnding strongly suggests that readers process tense in relation to the temporal properties of the discourse, and that constraints from these properties can n^ndly influence processing at a stnKtural level.

What are the categorical distinctions shared between conceptual and visual representations? One distinction may be between bounded and unbounded entities. Previous research in sign language has shown that even non-signers associate signs with repetitive motion with atelic verbs, such as “run”, and signs with sudden motion with telic verbs, such as “arrive”. In our first study, we show this distinction holds even when the visual stimuli depicted bear no intrinsic linguistic reference: we used non-linguistic random dot motions. In our second study, we demonstrate this association occurs spontaneously, even when subjects are not making explicit semantic judgments about verbs. We use a cross- modal lexical decision task in which verbs and non-words appear superimposed on bounded or unbounded dot stimuli. We find congruency when the motion boundedness matches the conceptual boundedness of the verb. Together, these studies provide evidence for an automatic link between visual and conceptual boundedness in the mind.

Previous research suggests that a verb’s meaning is learned partly through the aggregated profile of syntactic frames associated with it. For example, “turn” occurs with transitive and intransitive frames in causative alternation (“He turned the car”/“The car turned”), indicating it is a causal verb. Some evidence demonstrates that young children combine multiple frames to map verbs to appropriate events. However, previous work always presented these frames together, in a single dialogue. What remains unknown is how verb learning occurs when the frames are separated, uttered in different referential contexts, as is likely in children’s everyday life. In a series of cross-situational word-learning experiments, we show that both adults and three-year-olds generalize verb meanings across different syntactic frames in a cross-situational learning task. These results shed light on the cross-situational mechanisms of syntactic bootstrapping.

Generalizations that hold across all languages (linguistic universals) provide important insights into cognition, language, and learning. In semantics, the best-known universal is determiner conservativity: the truth of sentences like “every/most/some/no fish swim(s)” depends only on the determiner's first argument (“fish”). This rules out cross-linguistically unattested determiners (e.g., “equi fish swims” meaning ‘the fish and the swimmers are numerically equivalent' isn't conservative because both fish and swimmers matter). Zuber & Keenan (2019) propose a weakening of conservativity: determiners depend on their first OR second argument, but not both. Which constraint do learners obey? We test whether adults are able to learn novel determiners that are classically non-conservative but are conservative on the weakened view. We compare these ‘weakly conservative' cases against novel determiners that are conservative on both views and non-conservative on both views. We find that adults can learn conservative meanings, but not weakly conservative meanings, supporting the classical understanding.

After viewing motion events with a starting-point (Source) and end-point (Goal), people mention the Goal more often and remember it more accurately than the Source. This Goal privilege has been hypothesized to arise from an on-line attentional bias that occurs during event apprehension itself, yet no data exists that: (a) documents this online attentional bias and (b) correlates any online bias with offline memory and linguistic measures. Here we do just that: we recorded participants’ eye movements as they viewed or prepared to describe motion events and later tested their memory of Goals or Sources. We find an online attentional bias for Goals over Sources during initial encoding of events. This bias is stronger during free inspection compared to speech planning, an effect likely to reflect the fact that sentence preparation partially promotes encoding and mentioning Sources. Moreover, the extent of the attentional Goal bias is systematically related to both language production and memory, such that the attentional Goal bias is greatest when the Source is not mentioned later during production or not remembered later at test. Thus, we provide the first evidence that an attentional Goal bias appears as soon as one starts to visually encode motion events.

Early word-learning opportunities are often highly ambiguous, with this problem being especially difficult for verbs. While a verb's syntax can help to identify the referent event from the environment, learners still need to contend with temporal and spatial misalignment between verbs and their referent events. Although children are shown to use syntax to infer verb meaning when there is initially no co-occurring referent event, it remains unclear what role syntax plays in verb learning across exposures in tandem with referential information. With three adult word-learning experiments, we showed that while syntax independently informed verb meaning in the absence of referents, it did not additionally constrain subsequent mappings when a referent was present. These results reveal both the power of syntax in cross-situational verb-learning–persisting across exposures –and its limitations–failing to supersede co-present referents.

“Each” and “every” can be used to express the same truth-conditions but differ in their contexts of use. We adopt a particular psycho-semantic proposal about the meanings of these universal quantifiers: “each” has a meaning that interfaces with the psychological system for representing object-files whereas “every” has a meaning that interfaces with the psychological system for representing ensembles. In five experiments (n=798 total) we demonstrate that this mentalistic account correctly predicts newly-observed constraints on how “each” and “every” are pragmatically used. More generally, these results demonstrate that canonical patterns of language use are affected in predictable ways by fine-grained differences in semantic representations and the cognitive systems to which those representations connect. By treating the output of semantics as mental representations that are more finely articulated than truth-conditions—and by taking seriously the relationship between linguistic meanings and non-linguistic cognitive systems—we can explain otherwise puzzling patterns of language use.

Children and adults use linguistic context to learn new words. For instance, in “She wears the dax,” “dax” likely refers to clothing. We asked whether learners retain these constraints across ambiguous word-learning exposures. Adults (n=139) learned 12 words. On Exposure 1, novel nouns were presented as the object of either Restrictive (e.g., “wears”) or Non-restrictive (“finds”) verbs. Participants selected which of two compatible referents the noun referred to. On Exposure 2, participants heard each noun again and chose between a distractor referent and the unselected referent from Exposure 1—now the only referent compatible with the previous Restrictive verb. If adults retain selectional restrictions, then Restrictive verbs should increase selection of the compatible referent. However, we found no difference between Restrictive (M=.74, SD=.26) and Non-restrictive (M=.76, SD=.24) conditions, p=.24. This suggests adults use verbs’ selectional restrictions to identify referents in the moment but do not retain these restrictions across exposures.