ORCID Profile
0000-0003-2794-7977
Current Organisations
University of Toronto
,
Macquarie University
Does something not look right? The information on this page has been harvested from data sources that may not be up to date. We continue to work with information providers to improve coverage and quality. To report an issue, use the Feedback Form.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 08-05-2018
DOI: 10.1017/S0305000917000137
Abstract: Previous developmental studies of conjunction have focused on the syntax of phrasal and sentential coordination (Lust, 1977 de Villiers, Tager-Flusberg & Hakuta, 1977 Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter & Fiess, 1980, among others). The present study examined the flexibility of children's interpretation of conjunction. Specifically, when two predicates that can apply simultaneously to a single in idual are conjoined in the scope of a plural definite ( The bears are big and white ), conjunction receives a Boolean, intersective interpretation. However, when the conjoined predicates cannot apply simultaneously to an in idual ( The bears are big and small ), conjunction receives a weaker ‘split’ interpretation (Krifka, 1990 Lasersohn, 1995 Winter, 1996). Our experiments reveal that preschool-aged children are sensitive to both intersective and split interpretations, and can use their lexical and world knowledge of the relevant predicates in order to select an appropriate reading.
Publisher: Open Library of the Humanities
Date: 03-10-2018
DOI: 10.5334/GJGL.531
Abstract: Across languages, plural marking on count nouns typically gives rise to a multiplicity inference, indicating that the noun ranges over sums with a cardinality of 2 or more. Plural marking has also been observed to occur on mass nouns in Greek and a few other languages, giving rise to a parallel abundance inference, indicating that there is a lot of the relevant substance. It has been observed in the literature that both of these inferences disappear in downward-entailing environments, such as when a plural appears in the scope of negation (Tsoulas 2009 Kane et al. 2015). There are two main competing approaches in the literature that aim to account for the described pattern with respect to multiplicity inferences: the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and the implicature approach (Sauerland 2003 Spector 2007 Mayr 2015, among others). As discussed in Tieu et al. (2018), while both approaches can account for the upward- versus downward-entailing pattern of multiplicity inferences, they differ in what they predict with respect to the acquisition of these inferences and their relationship with implicatures. Tieu et al. (2014 2018) investigated multiplicity inferences in English and reported evidence for the implicature approach. In this paper, we first show how the ambiguity approach and the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference can be extended to account for the abundance inference. We then report on an experiment that tests the predictions of the two approaches for multiplicity and abundance inferences in preschool-aged children and adult native speakers of Greek. Our results replicate the patterns reported in Tieu et al. (2014 2018) for multiplicity inferences, and crucially reveal an analogous pattern for abundance inferences. Adults computed both kinds of inferences more in upward-entailing environments than in downward-entailing ones, and children computed fewer inferences overall than adults did. These results reflect an overall pattern of implicature calculation in line with a unified implicature analysis across the three kinds of inferences. By contrast, we discuss how they pose a challenge for the ambiguity approach.
Publisher: Open Library of the Humanities
Date: 04-12-2017
DOI: 10.5334/GJGL.334
Abstract: Two main analyses have been proposed to explain how co-speech gestures interact with logical operators. According to the Supplemental analysis (Ebert & Ebert 2014), co-speech gestures have the same semantic status as appositive relative clauses. According to the Cosuppositional analysis (Schlenker To appear a b), co-speech gestures trigger a particular kind of presupposition. The sentence “John will not use the stairs”, produced with an UP gesture (finger pointed upwards) is argued to give rise to the conditional presupposition that if John were to use the stairs, he would use the stairs in an upwards trajectory. Both the Supplemental and Cosuppositional analyses predict that inferences triggered by co-speech gestures should project out of the scope of operators, but not quite in the same way. We present an experimental investigation of the projection properties of the inferences arising from the co-speech gestures UP and DOWN in six different linguistic environments (plain affirmative and negative sentences, modal sentences containing “might”, and quantified sentences containing “each”, “none”, and “exactly one”). Applying a reading detection analysis (Cremers & Chemla 2017) to the responses of a Truth Value Judgment Task and a Picture Selection Task, we find evidence for existential projection of the gestural inferences in the scope of “each”, “none”, and “exactly one”, and, to some degree, local accommodation of the inferences. These results can be derived by the Cosuppositional analysis, in combination with an analysis of presupposition projection such as Beaver (2001), which predicts existential projection out of quantified structures on the other hand, both findings are difficult to reconcile with the Supplemental analysis. Our projection results bring gestural inferences and verbal presuppositions closer together, but a remaining puzzle is why in quantified structures we obtain existential rather than universal inferences (Chemla 2009), the latter being the more standard finding in the presuppositional literature (though see Tieu et al. 2016 for evidence of universal projection of the same gestural inferences).
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 24-12-2022
Abstract: Social media is increasingly used by young people, including those with communication disability. To date, though, little is known about how speech–language therapists (SLTs) support the social media use of young people with communication disability. To explore what services SLTs provide to facilitate the social media use of young people with communication disability, including what these services look like, and the factors that impact SLTs’ professional practices. A sequential mixed methods approach was employed including an online survey and in‐depth semi‐structured interviews. Participants were qualified practising SLTs in Australia with a caseload that included clients aged 12–16 years. Quantitative data were analysed with SPSS. A thematic analysis of qualitative data was conducted with NVivo. Survey responses from 61 SLTs were analysed. Interviews were conducted with 16 participants. Survey data indicated that SLTs do not systematically assess or treat young people's use of social media as part of their professional practice. Interview data revealed that where SLTs do support young people's use of social media, they transfer knowledge and practices typically used in offline contexts to underpin their work supporting clients’ use of social media. In terms of factors that affect SLTs’ practices, three major themes were identified: client/family factors, SLT factors, and societal factors. While young people with communication disability may desire digital participation in social media spaces, SLTs’ current professional practices do not routinely address this need. Professional practice guidelines would support SLTs’ practices in this area. Future research should seek the opinions of young people with communication disability regarding their use of social media, and the role of SLTs in facilitating this. Young people with communication disability use social media, but digital inequality means that they may not do so to the same extent as their typically developing peers. Services targeting a young person's social media use is within the SLT scope of practice. Whether or not SLTs routinely address the social media use of young people with communication disability as part of their professional practice is unknown. This study found that SLTs in Australia do not systematically provide professional services targeting young people's use of social media. When services do address a young person's use of social media, knowledge and practices typically used by SLTs in offline contexts are adapted to support their work targeting online social media contexts. This study indicates that SLTs should consider a range of factors when deciding whether to address a young person's social media use. Adapting existing offline professional practices to online environments could support SLTs’ work in providing services targeting social media use. Professional practice guidelines would support SLTs’ work facilitating the social media use of young people with communication disability.
Publisher: No publisher found
Date: 2019
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 17-10-2018
Abstract: Most expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) studies to date have been performed in heterogeneous tissues as opposed to specific cell types. To better understand the cell-type–specific regulatory landscape of human melanocytes, which give rise to melanoma but account for % of typical human skin biopsies, we performed an eQTL analysis in primary melanocyte cultures from 106 newborn males. We identified 597,335 cis -eQTL SNPs prior to linkage disequilibrium (LD) pruning and 4997 eGenes (FDR 0.05). Melanocyte eQTLs differed considerably from those identified in the 44 GTEx tissue types, including skin. Over a third of melanocyte eGenes, including key genes in melanin synthesis pathways, were unique to melanocytes compared to those of GTEx skin tissues or TCGA melanomas. The melanocyte data set also identified trans -eQTLs, including those connecting a pigmentation-associated functional SNP with four genes, likely through cis -regulation of IRF4 . Melanocyte eQTLs are enriched in cis -regulatory signatures found in melanocytes as well as in melanoma-associated variants identified through genome-wide association studies. Melanocyte eQTLs also colocalized with melanoma GWAS variants in five known loci. Finally, a transcriptome-wide association study using melanocyte eQTLs uncovered four novel susceptibility loci, where imputed expression levels of five genes ( ZFP90 , HEBP1 , MSC , CBWD1 , and RP11-383H13.1 ) were associated with melanoma at genome-wide significant P -values. Our data highlight the utility of lineage-specific eQTL resources for annotating GWAS findings, and present a robust database for genomic research of melanoma risk and melanocyte biology.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2020
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 03-03-2015
DOI: 10.1093/JOS/FFV001
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 04-08-2016
DOI: 10.1093/JOS/FFW010
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 06-11-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-09-2018
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 29-10-2020
DOI: 10.1007/S11050-020-09165-9
Abstract: In English and many other languages, the interpretation of the plural is associated with an ‘exclusive’ reading in positive sentences and an ‘inclusive’ reading in negative ones. For ex le, the plural noun tulips in a sentence such as Chicken planted tulips suggests that Chicken planted more than one tulip (i.e., a reading which ‘excludes’ atomic in idual tulips). At the same time, however, the corresponding negative sentence Chicken didn’t plant tulips doesn’t merely convey that he didn’t plant more than one tulip, but rather that he didn’t plant any tulip (i.e., ‘including’ atomic in idual tulips). Different approaches to the meaning contribution of the English plural vary in how they account for this alternation across the polarities, but converge on assuming that (at least one of) the denotation(s) of the plural should include atomic in iduals. Turkish, on the other hand, is cited as one of the few known languages in which the plural only receives an exclusive interpretation (e.g., Bale et al. Cross-linguistic representations of numerals and number marking. in: Li, Lutz (eds) Semantics and linguistic theory (SALT) 20, CLC Publications, Ithaca, pp 582–598, 2010). More recent proposals have, however, argued that the Turkish plural should in fact be analysed more like the English plural (e.g., Sağ, The semantics of number marking: reference to kinds, counting, and optional classifiers, PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 2019). We report two experiments investigating Turkish-speaking adults’ and preschool-aged children’s interpretation of positive and negative sentences containing plural nouns. The results provide clear evidence for inclusive interpretations of the plural in Turkish, supporting accounts that treat the Turkish and English plurals alike. We briefly discuss how an inclusive meaning of the Turkish plural can be integrated within a theory of the Turkish number system which captures some idiosyncratic properties of the singular and the agreement between number and number numerals.
Publisher: Linguistic Society of America
Date: 14-08-2010
Abstract: This paper examines the monolingual acquisition of the English polarity-sensitive item 'any', and uses evidence from child language acquisition to shed light on two questions that arise from the theoretical semantics literature. First, evidence from child spontaneous speech production is used to argue that children are grammatically conservative in their acquisition of negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. The same child data are then used to argue the following: (i) there is only one NPI 'any', subject to a disjunctive licensing condition (ii) NPI 'any' differs in some way from free choice (FC) 'any', resulting in the later emergence of FC 'any'.
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 29-07-2015
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2018
DOI: 10.1016/J.COGNITION.2018.04.020
Abstract: Previous developmental studies have revealed variation in children's ability to compute scalar inferences. While children have been shown to struggle with standard scalar inferences (e.g., with scalar quantifiers like "some") (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2001 Guasti et al., 2005 Noveck, 2001 Papafragou & Musolino, 2003), there is also a growing handful of inferences that children have been reported to derive quite readily (Barner & Bachrach, 2010 Hochstein, Bale, Fox, & Barner, 2016 Papafragou & Musolino, 2003 Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016 Stiller, Goodman, & Frank, 2015 Tieu, Romoli, Zhou, & Crain, 2016 Tieu et al., 2017). One recent approach, which we refer to as the Alternatives-based approach, attributes the variability in children's performance to limitations in how children engage with the alternative sentences that are required to compute the relevant inferences. Specifically, if the alternative sentences can be generated by simplifying the assertion, rather than by lexically replacing one scalar term with another, children should be better able to compute the inference. In this paper, we investigated this prediction by assessing how children and adults interpret sentences that embed disjunction under a universal quantifier, such as "Every elephant caught a big butterfly or a small butterfly". For adults, such sentences typically give rise to the distributive inference that some elephant caught a big butterfly and some elephant caught a small butterfly (Crnič, Chemla, & Fox, 2015 Fox, 2007 Gazdar, 1979). Another possible interpretation, though not one typically accessed by adults, is the conjunctive inference that every elephant caught a big butterfly and a small butterfly (Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016). Crucially, for our purposes, it has been argued that both of these inferences can be derived using alternatives that are generated by deleting parts of the asserted sentence, rather than through lexical replacement, making these sentences an ideal test case for evaluating the predictions of the Alternatives-based approach. The findings of our experimental study reveal that children are indeed able to successfully compute this class of inferences, providing support for the Alternatives-based approach as a viable explanation of children's variable success in computing scalar inferences.
Publisher: Open Library of the Humanities
Date: 20-04-2018
DOI: 10.5334/GJGL.388
Abstract: This paper reports on five experiments investigating intervention effects in negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. Such intervention effects involve the unexpected ungrammaticality of sentences that contain an intervener, such as a universal quantifier, in between the NPI and its licensor. For ex le, the licensing of the NPI any in the sentence *Monkey didn’t give every lion any chocolate is disrupted by intervention. Interveners also happen to be items that trigger scalar implicatures in environments in which NPIs are licensed (Chierchia 2004 2013). A natural hypothesis, initially proposed in Chierchia (2004), is that there is a link between the two phenomena. In this paper, we investigate whether intervention effects arise when scalar implicatures are derived.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-02-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-04-2022
DOI: 10.1177/17470218221080645
Abstract: Among other uses, co-speech gestures can contribute additional semantic content to the spoken utterances with which they coincide. A growing body of research is dedicated to understanding how inferences from gestures interact with logical operators in speech, including negation (“not”/“n’t”), modals (e.g., “might”), and quantifiers (e.g., “each,” “none,” “exactly one”). A related but less addressed question is what kinds of meaningful content other than gestures can evince this same behaviour this is in turn connected to the much broader question of what properties of gestures are responsible for how they interact with logical operators. We present two experiments investigating sentences with co-speech sound effects and co-text emoji in lieu of gestures, revealing a remarkably similar inference pattern to that of co-speech gestures. The results suggest that gestural inferences do not behave the way they do because of any traits specific to gestures, and that the inference pattern extends to a much broader range of content.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 14-04-2016
Publisher: Open Library of the Humanities
Date: 16-10-2018
DOI: 10.5334/GJGL.580
Abstract: The nature of the semantic contribution of co-speech gestures has been the subject of recent theoretical and experimental investigation. Such gestures have been reported to give rise to cosuppositional inferences that can project out of certain linguistic environments, much in the way that presuppositions of verbal expressions do (Schlenker 2018a b). For ex le, a sentence like “John will not [use the stairs]_UP”, produced with a finger pointed upwards while pronouncing the verb phrase, is argued to give rise to the inference that if John were to use the stairs, he would go up the stairs. Tieu et al. (2017) investigated the projection properties of directional inferences associated with the gestures UP and DOWN, using a Truth Value Judgment Task and a Picture Selection Task, and reported the presence of existential projection of the gestural inferences out of quantified environments. We investigated the same gestural inferences using a method that more closely tracks the introspective judgments reported in the literature on gesture projection. Participants were presented with an Inferential Judgment Task, in which they had to rate the strength of inferences arising from UP and DOWN in six different linguistic environments. Using this task, we observed projection of the conditional inference from the scope of negation and universal projection of the inference from the scope of “none” and “exactly one”, as well as suggestive evidence that the inference can be locally accommodated in the scope of negation and “none.” These main findings would be difficult to explain if gestures were posited to make at-issue contributions the finding of local accommodation is also not straightforwardly explained on the view that co-speech gestures contribute supplement-like meanings (Ebert & Ebert 2014). On the other hand, both main findings are compatible with the view that co-speech gestures trigger cosuppositions.
Publisher: Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
Date: 06-2016
DOI: 10.1121/1.4954385
Abstract: This study tested American preschoolers' ability to use phrasal prosody to constrain their syntactic analysis of locally ambiguous sentences containing noun/verb homophones (e.g., [The baby flies] [hide in the shadows] vs [The baby] [flies his kite], brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). The words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. In an oral completion task, 4- to 5-year-olds successfully exploited the sentence's prosodic structure to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, mirroring previous results in French (but challenging previous English-language results) and providing cross-linguistic evidence for the role of phrasal prosody in children's syntactic analysis.
Publisher: Open Library of the Humanities
Date: 31-12-2018
DOI: 10.5334/GJGL.604
Abstract: Sentences involving past tense verbs, such as “My dogs were on the carpet”, tend to give rise to the inference that the corresponding present tense version, “My dogs are on the carpet”, is false. This inference is often referred to as a cessation or temporal inference, and is generally analyzed as a type of implicature. There are two main proposals for capturing this asymmetry: one assumes a difference in informativity between the past and present counterparts (Altshuler & Schwarzschild 2013), while the other proposes a structural difference between the two (Thomas 2012). The two approaches are similar in terms of empirical coverage, but differ in their predictions for language acquisition. Using a novel animated picture selection paradigm, we investigated these predictions. Specifically, we compared the performance of a group of 4–6-year-old children and a group of adults on temporal inferences, scalar implicatures arising from “some”, and inferences of adverbial modifiers under negation. The results revealed that overall, children computed all three inferences at a lower rate than adult controls however they were more adult-like on temporal inferences and inferences of adverbial modifiers than on scalar implicatures. We discuss the implications of the findings, both for a developmental alternatives-based hypothesis (e.g., Barner et al. 2011 Singh et al. 2016 Tieu et al. 2016 2018), as well as theories of temporal inferences, arguing that the finding that children were more (and equally) adult-like on temporal inferences and adverbial modifiers supports a structural theory of temporal inferences along the lines of Thomas (2012).
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 25-09-2017
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 13-07-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 24-02-2021
No related grants have been discovered for Lyn Tieu.