I am a Lecturer (= Tenured Assistant Professor) in Child Language Acquisition in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University in the UK. In my research, I investigate the quantity and quality of input that is developmentally meaningful for children learning the same language particularly in their acquisition of complex syntactic knowledge such as the verbal passive.
Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Language Science at the University of California, Irvine, working with Lisa Pearl and funded by an SPRF grant from the National Science Foundation.
Children seem to be relatively delayed in their comprehension of the verbal be-passive in English, compared to their acquisition of other constructions of object-movement such as wh-questions and unaccusatives. Prior work has found that children’s performance on these passives can be affected by the verb’s lexical semantics. Through a meta-analysis of experimental studies assessing English-speaking children’s age of acquisition for the verbal be- passive, we identify a developmental trajectory composed of five classes, where each class has a distinct lexical semantic profile. A Truth-Value Judgment (TVJ) Task assessing English-speaking children’s comprehension of verbal be-passives supports this developmental trajectory. Together, the meta-analysis and TVJ study underscore the importance of lexical semantics for understanding the development of the English verbal be-passive.
@article{nguyen_pearl_langacq_2021,title={The link between lexical semantic features and children's comprehension of English verbal <i>be</i>-passives},author={Nguyen, Emma and Pearl, Lisa},journal={Language Acquisition},year={2021},publisher={Taylor \& Francis},doi={10.1080/10489223.2021.1939354},url={https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10489223.2021.1939354?journalCode=hlac20},dimensions={true},}
