Research Projects
Broadening the grammatical perspectives on Argument Ellipsis
Prof. Idan Landau
Funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Grant No. 495/20, 2020–2025
Null arguments come in many varieties, one of which is Argument Ellipsis (AE) – a full constituent which is syntactically projected and semantically interpreted, but remains unpronounced. The properties of AE have been mostly studied in East Asian languages, but not much beyond. In this research, we investigate AE in Hebrew, attempting to answer the following questions: What kind of arguments can or cannot be elided? Are the constraints syntactic, semantic, or both? Do non-nominal arguments (PPs and CPs) undergo ellipsis? How can this possibility be reliably distinguished from other strategies (i.e., implicit arguments)? And what is ultimately the crosslinguistic parameter that determines whether a given language displays AE or not?
Encoding and retrieval in sentence processing errors: Comparing Hebrew and English
Prof. Aya Meltzer-Asscher in collaboration with Prof. Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts)
Funded by BSF-NSF, Grant No. 2021719, 2022-2026
To understand language, we need to relate different, sometimes distant, elements in the sentence. For example, in the sentence “The boy who met the nice neighbors is smiling”, we need to create a dependency between the subject – “the boy” – and the verb “is smiling”. To do that, we need to use intricate memory representations. One of the goals of psycholinguistic research is to characterize the memory mechanisms enabling these processes, and in order to achieve this, it is interesting to observe when, and why, these processes fail. For example, it is well-known that speakers occasionally produce erroneous sentences such as “The boy who met the nice neighbors are smiling”, and comprehenders fail to notice such errors. In this project we investigate the processing of sentences with agreement errors, in Hebrew and in English, in order to understand what causes processing failures – memory encoding or retrieval – and what role the language’s grammar plays in these processes.
Varieties of plural predication
Dr. Moshe Bar-Lev
Funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Grant No. 789/24, 2024-2028
Natural language allows us to attribute properties to specific individuals, as in the singular predication ״Dina smiled״; it also allows us to attribute properties to groups of individuals (pluralities), as in the plural predication ״Dina and Rina smiled״ or ״the kids smiled״. Certain properties of predication which are manifested with plural predication are difficult to discern or entirely disappear with singular predication, e.g., distributivity (exemplified by the inference from ״Rina and Dina smiled״ that Rina smiled and Dina smiled) and homogeneity (exemplified by the inference from ״Rina and Dina didn’t smile״ that neither Rina nor Dina smiled). The goal of this project is then to probe into the nature of predication by exploring the variation between predicates with respect to homogeneity and distributivity (among other things), as a way to achieve a better understanding of the nature of predication.
Mechanisms of encoding and encoding interference in sentence processing
Prof. Aya Meltzer-Asscher
Funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Grant No. 525/22, 2022-2026
Language comprehension requires rapid and accurate formation of dependencies between elements within a sentence. To establish such dependencies, the listener or reader must encode words into memory, maintain their representation while processing intervening input, and retrieve them accurately when the dependency needs to be resolved. Through a series of behavioral experiments, this project examines the processes underlying encoding in working memory. The experiments investigate the phenomenon of encoding interference - that is, partial or inaccurate encoding resulting from similarity between words in a sentence - its causes, and how it manifests.
The acquisition of bi-consonantal strings in Arabic: Experience-dependent and experience-independent factors
Prof. Outi Bat-El Foux (in collaboration with Dr. Avivit Ben-David, Hadassah Academic College)
Funded by Israel Science Foundation (ISF), grant No. 1902/21, 2021-2026
Our study confronts the heated debate on the tools available to children in the course of language acquisition. Researchers agree that language acquisition is experience dependent, but here we ask whether it also incorporates experience-independent universal constraints. To address this question, we study the early speech of children acquiring Palestinian Arabic, focusing on the development of bi-consonantal strings in different positions within the word. Based on our previous research, we hypothesize that the effect of experience-independent universal constraints will emerge during early speech, before language-specific effects, in particular frequency, start taking over. To verify this hypothesis, we study a language with a large variety of CC-strings that violate universal principles (e.g. lban ‘gum’, which violates the Sonority Sequencing Principle).
