Kristen Syrett, Presidential Fellow 2005-2007
Linguistics

Adapted from The Graduate School Quarterly, Spring 2005:

Kristen Syrett is interested in abstract semantic representations in child language. A visitor to the language acquisition lab is greeted by one of Syrett's collaborators (see photo). Jerry plays the part of a participant in the games that form the basis of Syrett's experiments who often needs help from the children to understand how language describes the objects or stories they are shown. What the children are helping the puppet to understand, whether they know it or not, are the interpretations of sentences containing quantifiers (such as "every"), gradable adjectives (such as "big" and "full"), or verb phrase ellipsis. What do these experiments tell us about children's linguistic knowledge and language in general?

In answer, Syrett pulls out two blue cubes, one smaller than the other, from her bag of tricks and asks her guest to identify "the big cube." Either cube would easily fit in a coffee cup, but the visitor nevertheless chooses the larger of the two. The meaning of the word "big" depends context. The contextually-determined comparison class supplies a standard. Even though the cubes are small, one of them counts as big for that context, and the singular definite phrase "the big one" tells the child that there is such a unique object. Syrett and her collaborators have found that children as young as age three know this. Next out of the magic box come two transparent containers, one about a third full of lentils, another about half full. The visitor unerringly declares that neither container is "full," a word that adults know does not depend on context. Its meaning is oriented towards a maximal endpoint of fullness.  Interestingly, while Syrett's three-year-old participants have shown independently that they understand "full," they frequently give the puppet the fuller container. Her current research explores the pragmatic factors that allow children to deviate from adults, while their semantic representations of these gradable adjectives appear to be shared.

Context also plays a role with sentence interpretation. Syrett says that we see this in verb phrase ellipsis, an English grammatical construction wherein an entire verb phrase appears to be deleted from a sentence. For example, the sentence "Clifford wanted to read every book that Goofy did" has two possible meanings, depending on how the missing verb phrase is understood. Goofy either could have read the books or wanted to read them. Syrett designs stories that favor one reading or the other, then investigates whether young children can access both meanings of sentences like this one and if they prefer the same meaning that adults do. She has continued to push the limits of children's interpretation of such sentences involving antecedent-contained deletion.  For example, while adults do not typically see sentences such as "Clifford said that Goofy read every book that Scooby did," as ambiguous, children as young as four years of age do.  Her research explores the grammatical and processing factors that give rise to this developmental difference between age groups.

At the very least, Syrett hopes her investigations with children and adults inform the theoretical models that are used by syntacticians and semanticists in the field of Linguistics. What implications do Syrett's experiments have for the real world? "Cognitive and linguistic development are intimately connected," Syrett explains. Children are able to process and form generalizations about language. At the same time, language helps them categorize experiences. Overlap in semantic concepts among languages enables investigations of English-speaking children to be useful in hypothesizing about children learning other languages, according to Syrett. Her findings may also be useful for studying children with linguistic and cognitive disorders and for helping educators to develop curricula.  Advisor Jeffrey Lidz notes that Syrett's research "addresses one of the hardest problems in language acquisition," how a child learns to coordinate contextual, cognitive and linguistic knowledge to arrive at meaning.