John Ryan

John Ryan is a PhD student studying how children acquire tense and aspect through psycholinguistic methodologies. John is interested in exploring questions like how children navigate the acquisition of tense and aspect given their emerging and developing event representations and what the trajectory of their development can tell us about properties of Language as a whole. In particular, John’s research focuses primarily on the acquisition of the imperfective and progressive in American English and Argentine Spanish.

Beyond this primary focus, John has been investigating properties of “sequential ‘and’”. For example, the sentence “Mary fell and broke her arm” is fine when describing events that happened in that order (Mary first fell and then broke her arm), but reversing the conjuncts relative to the same context is comparatively odd: “#Mary broke her arm and fell”. This project ties closely to his broader interest in how events are represented and organized with respect to tense and aspect.