[CANCELLED] LSLT: Mina Hirzel (LING)

This talk has been cancelled. 

Young children’s elicited productions of modal words: children differentiate modal “flavors” and forces

Abstract: Corpus studies (Wells, 1979) and comprehension studies (Hirst & Weil, 1982; Ozturk & Papafragou, 2014) suggest that children have difficulty learning modal words (e.g., ‘can’, ‘must’). This is standardly attributed to conceptual or pragmatic difficulties (Papafragou, 1998; Noveck, 2001). We use a sentence-repair task to show that children’s difficulty arises instead from the many-to-one mapping between modal meanings and forms.

Lunch served at 12:15.