Speaker: Emma Nguyen (UConn)

Abstract: Several studies have noted that English children’s performance on passive sentences containing a by-phrase depends on the lexical semantics of the verb. Building on prior work identifying the importance of lexical factors for this process, I’ll talk about a Bayesian model that can capture experimentally-observed passivization behavior in five-year-olds, given child-directed speech to learn from. Furthermore, I’ll discuss results and predictions of the model and a preliminary look at current experimental designs.