MSU Language Acquisition Lab

People

The lab currently consists of the following people.

Faculty

  • Cristina Schmitt
  • Alan Munn

Current Graduate Students

  • Savvy Barnes
  • Xiaoke Bu

  • Louis Konkoly My current project is looking at patterns of English verb agreement, specifically in sentences with non-DP subjects. These are sentences such as “Under the bed is a good place to hide” and “That James left early upset me” where the subject is presumably the PP in the former and the CP in the latter. My interests lie in what happens to the verb when these non-DP subjects are coordinated: “under the bed and behind the curtains”. The existing literature on this topic identifies a notion of the conjoined elements shared ‘semantic compatibility’ as contributing to an alternation between singular and plural verb forms. My research is investigating the contribution of both these supposed semantic effects and potential non-semantic effects.

  • John Ryan
  • Yaxuan Wang «««< HEAD
  • Jingying Xu Languages have sophisticated ways of encoding the temporal structure of events, signaling different types of endings either explicitly or implicitly. This project investigates how language and context influence the interpretation of event descriptions in English and Mandarin, focusing on both children and adults. We aim to address three key questions:

How do linguistic elements—such as verbs, direct objects, and tense/aspect markers in English and Mandarin, two typologically distinct languages—affect the way children and adults evaluate whether events have reached their natural endpoints? What is the developmental trajectory of aspectual understanding in English- and Mandarin-speaking children, and what causes the non-adultlike responses often observed in children? How does visual context interact with language to shape how children and adults perceive events and interpret event descriptions? =======

  • Ellie Xia
  • Jingying Xu

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Current Undergraduate Students

  • Hannah Choi
  • Darrien Courter
  • Mason Dellot
  • Kiara Gonzalez Almanzar
  • Daniel Helo Puccini
  • Drake Howard
  • Kay Humpert
  • Jaina Kittle
  • William McLaren
  • Sophie Motawi