"Reconsidering animacy hierarchy effects in Mayan: Experimental evidence from Ch’ol"  (presenting joint work with Stefan Keine (UCLA), Juan Vázquez Álvarez (CIMSUR-UNAM), and Michael Wagner (McGill)) Like many other Mayan languages, Ch’ol has been described as restricting the combination of 3rd person arguments in a transitive clause according to their relative animacy (Zavala 2007, Vázquez Álvarez...

Infants learn saltatory alternations: evidence from Catalan

Interaction of Split Ergativity and DOM in Haryanvi This talk investigates the interaction of split ergativity and differential object marking in Haryanvi, an under-studied Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northern India. Like Hindi, Haryanvi can be classified as a split-ergative language, where transitive subjects in the perfective aspect are case-marked differently than subjects in other aspects....

Predicting contrastive alternatives in the comprehension of focus How and when are focus alternatives identified during real-time language processing? I will raise the possibility that, at least in certain contexts, comprehenders can anticipate the relevance of a particular set of contrastive alternatives, before focus has been encountered. Evidence in favor of such predictive processing would...

How do Spanish-learning infants discover morphological suffixes? (UBC Talk) Suffixes like English -s, -ed and -ing, and Spanish -a and -o are the basic building blocks of syntax. In this talk, I will first identify the mechanism by which English-learning infants find suffixes. To do so, I will use modeling to evaluate various mechanisms for affix discovery against...