33.2310, Diss: Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics; Syntax: Adam Liter: '' Explorations in Diagnosing Competence and Performance Factors in Linguistic Inquiry''

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-2310. Thu Jul 21 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.2310, Diss:  Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics; Syntax: Adam Liter: '' Explorations in Diagnosing Competence and Performance Factors in Linguistic Inquiry''

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Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2022 03:10:07
From: Adam Liter [io at adamliter.org]
Subject: Explorations in Diagnosing Competence and Performance Factors in Linguistic Inquiry

 
Institution: University of Maryland 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2022 

Author: Adam Liter

Dissertation Title: Explorations in Diagnosing Competence and Performance
Factors in Linguistic Inquiry 

Dissertation URL:  https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/29000

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Syntax


Dissertation Director(s):
Norbert Hornstein
Jeffrey Lidz

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the
signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic
inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that
performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to
assume that measurements that we take do transparently reflect the underlying
grammatical competence that is the target of inquiry. This has been a very
useful and fruitful assumption in the vast majority of cases. Nonetheless,
there are certain cases where more careful consideration of the linking
hypothesis between the underlying competence of interest and the measurements
of linguistic behavior (i.e., performance) might be warranted. This
dissertation presents three case studies that try to model such consideration.
How performance and competence might interact is highly dependent on the
phenomenon being investigated as well as the method used to investigate it, so
there is no one-size-fits-all approach. The goal of this dissertation is to
model such consideration and to encourage more of it. In Chapter 2, we
investigate English-acquiring children’s non-adult-like productions of medial
wh-phrases. On the basis of experimental data showing a correlation between
cognitive inhibition and the production of such examples, we will argue that
the best explanation of these productions is that children fail to inhibit the
pronunciation of the wh-copy at the intermediate clause boundary due to an
underdeveloped executive function and that children do have the target
adult-like English grammar with respect to the formation of wh-dependencies
(contra, e.g., Thornton 1990, McDaniel, Chiu, & Maxfield 1995, de Villiers et
al. 2011). Then, in Chapter 4, we investigate the status of island violations
under sluicing (i.e., TP ellipsis). Sluicing apparently improves the
acceptability of island violations contained inside the ellipsis site (see,
e.g., Ross 1969). Whether we should understood this improved acceptability as
indicative of such examples being grammatical is an open question (cf. Ross
1969, Chomsky 1972, Lasnik 2001, Fox & Lasnik 2003, Merchant 2005, 2008b,
2009, Temmerman 2013, Griffiths & Lipták 2014, Barros 2014a, Barros et al.
2014, 2015). We investigate the status of such examples with several 2 × 2
experiments, an experimental paradigm discussed in detail in Chapter 3. The
idea of the experimental design is to use differences between acceptability
ratings and subtraction logic afforded by the linking hypothesis between
acceptability and grammaticality to try to more directly get at
grammaticality. Our results are ultimately somewhat inconclusive, but for
potentially methodologically informative reasons. Finally, in Chapter 5, we
use the same kind of experimental paradigm to investigate the status of
Bulgarian examples with multiple wh-dependencies, where one of the
wh-dependencies crosses an island and the other does not. Bulgarian is a
language with multiple fronting of wh-elements, and it has been observed that
examples where one of the wh-dependencies spans an island but not the other
are improved in acceptability (see, e.g., Richards 1997, 1998, 2001). Such
examples have thus been taken to be grammatical, though they do still exhibit
some degree of unacceptability. We use the same experimental paradigm to try
to ascertain the grammaticality status of these examples. We find evidence
that such examples are grammatical, which reaffirms the importance of ensuring
our syntactic theories can account for such examples.




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