Victoria E. Mateu

In the past few years, most of my research has focused on the acquisition of argument structures (i.e., which expressions are syntactically or semantically required by a particular verb) and constructions that involve ‘non-local dependencies’ or ‘intervention.’

 

Studies on acquisition have established that children exhibit comprehension difficulties with sentences in which a noun phrase intervenes between another noun phrase and the predicate that is associated with it. In the sentence ‘The dog that the cat is chasing _ attacked the child’, ‘the dog’ is the object/patient of the chasing event, but ‘the cat’ is intervening in that non-local dependency. In my research, I have used intervention effects in children as a tool to detect silent arguments or structures that may nevertheless be syntactically represented in child and adult grammars. For instance, investigating the ‘raising’ verbs seem/’parecer’, I found that English-speaking children have difficulties comprehending sentences such as ‘The dog seems _ to be old’ until at least 6 years of age. Whereas Spanish-speaking children comprehend superficially analogous sentences, such as ‘El perro parece _ ser viejo’, by age 4. Corpus results also confirmed that English-speaking children underuse raising structures compared to what is expected given their input, but Spanish-speaking children do not. This behavioral difference allowed me to conclude that while the English raising verb seem always projects an experiencer argument (i.e., The dog seems <to someone> to be old), the Spanish modal-like verb parecer does not (hence the impossibility of *El perro le parece a alguien ser viejo). This and other associated studies (e.g., with ‘control’ verbs like promise) can be found in the links below.

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Publications

• Mateu, Victoria & Nina Hyams. (2021). On children’s late acquisition of raising ‘seem’ and control ‘promise’: Is a unified account possible? In Adriana Belletti & Chris Collins (eds.) Smuggling, 222-254. Vol. in Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [pdf]

• Mateu, Victoria & Nina Hyams. (2019). On the learnability of implicit arguments. In Tania Ionin & Matthew Rispoli (eds.) Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research, 185-201. Vol. 63 of Language Acquisition & Language Disorders. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. [pdf]

• Mateu, Victoria. (2019). Intervention effects in the acquisition of raising: Evidence from English and Spanish. Language Acquisition. 1-34. [pdf]

• Mateu, Victoria. (2018). What cross-linguistic acquisition differences can tell us about invisible syntax: The case of Spanish ‘parecer’. Proceedings of the 41st Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 41]. 481-494. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. [pdf]

• Mateu, Victoria. (2016). Intervention Effects in the Acquisition of Raising and Control: Evidence from English and Spanish. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Dissertation. [link]

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In another set of experiments, I further explored the role of intervention in the analysis of ellipsis, specifically elided wh-questions or ‘sluices’. In joint work with Dr. Nina Hyams, I found that children exhibit more difficulties comprehending object sluices (e.g., ‘The boy is chasing someone can you see who <the boy is chasing _>?’) than subject sluices (e.g., ‘Someone is chasing the boy can you see who <_ is chasing the boy>?’) and that their performance on object sluices positively correlated with their performance on object relative clauses (e.g., Point to the boy that the girl is chasing _). These results are most compatible with theoretical analyses that propose that the elided material is in fact syntactically represented and not simply ‘pragmatically’ inferred. In subsequent work with Minqi Liu (C. Phil in Linguistics at UCLA) and Dr. Nina Hyams we have tested these structures in Mandarin-Chinese-speaking children and obtained compatible results.

 

Currently, I am investigating sluicing in Spanish. According to the P-Stranding Generalization, languages that do not allow preposition stranding should not allow it under sluicing either. Spanish doesn't allow P-stranding in questions (e.g., *¿Quién está María hablando con _? 'Who is Maria speaking with _?'), and thus, sluices should always include an explicit P before the wh-phrase, as a result of pied-piping (e.g., 'María está hablando con alguien, ves con quién <está María hablando _>?' 'Maria is speaking with someone, can you see with whom <she's speaking _>?' should be the only option, and not 'María está hablando con alguien, ves quién <está María hablando con _>? 'Maria is speaking with someone, can you see who <she's speaking with _>?'). However, recently, it has been claimed that Spanish represents an exception to this rule, and that this is evidence for no structure, no movement, or a more complex, non-isomorphic structure at the ellipsis site. Results from an exhaustive corpus study show that children exhibit a subject>object asymmetry, as found in English and Chinese, such that they produce relatively fewer object sluices compared to their input, which suggests structure and movement at the ellipsis site. Moreover, we have been able to confirm that Spanish-speaking adults do indeed produce omitted/stranded prepositions under sluicing (>30%). This represents the first empirical evidence of P-stranding productions in Spanish sluices. Crucially, children frequency-match this pattern, and do not underuse or overuse it relative to their input, which suggests that P-stranding/omission under sluicing is unlikely to involve a much more complex or much simpler derivation than typical sluices, in line with isomorphic accounts. This project earned me the Faculty Career Development Award 2023-2024. Currently I am collecting experimental data from children aged 3-6.

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Publications

• Liu, Minqi, Nina Hyams, & Victoria Mateu. (2022). The syntax and acquisition of Mandarin sluice-like constructions. Tsinghua Linguistics, 1(1), 122–171.

• Mateu, Victoria & Nina Hyams. (2021). Structural intervention effects in the acquisition of sluicing. Language Acquisition 28. 6-38. [pdf]

• Liu, Minqi, Nina Hyams, & Victoria Mateu. (2020). Late intervention effects in the acquisition of Mandarin sluice-like constructions.  Proceedings of the 44th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 44]. 322-335. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. [link]

• Mateu, Victoria & Nina Hyams. (2020). The structure of silence: A look at children’s comprehension of sluicing. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society [NELS 49]. Volume 2. 265-278. Independently published. [pdf]

• Mateu, Victoria, Nina Hyams & Lauren Winans. (2019). Intervention effects in early grammar: Evidence from sluicing. Proceedings of the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 42].  532-545. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. [pdf]

• Hyams, Nina, Victoria Mateu, Lauren Winans. (2017). Ellipsis meets wh-movement: Sluicing in early grammar. In Nicholas LaCara, Keir Moulton & Anne-Michelle Tessier (eds.) A Schrift to Fest Kyle Johnson. Linguistics Open Access Publications. 1. [link]

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I have also explored intervention in relation to psychological verbs such as ‘gustar’ in Spanish, which exhibit an idiosyncratic syntactico-semantic structure. For instance, in ‘A la maestra le gustan los niños’ (lit. To the teacher to-her like the children, ‘The teacher likes children’) the experiencer is expressed as a dative object (‘a la maestra’), often in pre-verbal position, while the theme is expressed as the nominative subject (‘los niños’), often in post-verbal position. In a corpus study I found that Spanish-speaking children under 7 underuse the theme subject-verb- object experiencer order (SVO) compared to their input. In a receptive experiment I also found that questions such as ‘¿Qué niña le gusta a la maestra _?’ (‘What girl does the teacher like?) were harder to comprehend (by both children and adults) than sentences such as ‘¿A qué niña _ le gusta la maestra?’ (What girl likes the teacher?)  even though the former maintains the canonical SVO order of the language. This asymmetry was particularly exacerbated when the fronted theme and the experiencer shared morphological features (i.e., both were singular nouns, as opposed to one being singular and one being plural). These results confirm syntactic accounts that claim that the experiencer occupies a higher position than the theme in the representation of verbs like ‘gustar’, and that the source of difficulties with theme-extracted questions is indeed ‘intervention effects’, and not word order frequency effects.

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Publications

• Mateu, Victoria. (2022). On the acquisition of Spanish psych predicates: When intervention makes extraction of a nominative wh-phrase harder. Isogloss 8(4)/6. 1-27. [pdf]

• Mateu, Victoria. (2022). Object Wh-questions with Psych Verbs Are Easy in Child Spanish. Proceedings of the 46th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 46].  524-536. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. [link]

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In a research project related to Minqi Liu’s dissertation we have also explored intervention effects in children’s comprehension of Mandarin short (no explicit nor implicit external argument in this language) and long passives. Results show that mismatches based on number (canonically a phi feature) or purely semantic features (long thin objects vs. generic objects) do not improve children’s performance with passives, as predicted by language-specific, grammatical accounts such as featural Relativized Minimality, which argue that only features that trigger movement in the target language will induce intervention effects. We presented part of these results at BUCLD 47, and the 2023 LSA annual meeting, and we have recently published two papers based on these findings (and one under prep).

 

Publications

• Liu, Minqi, Victoria Mateu, & Nina Hyams. (2023). Intervention effects in Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of passives. Proceedings of the 47th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 47].  Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. [link]

• Liu, Minqi, Victoria Mateu, & Nina Hyams. (2024). On the representation of implicit arguments in child grammar: Short passives in Mandarin and English. Languages 9: 236. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9070236 [link]

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In collaboration with Dr. Laurel Perkins and Dr. Nina Hyams, I continue to examine the argument structure of Spanish verbs. Intransitive verbs have been traditionally divided into two categories: unergative verbs – those that involve an agent subject (e.g., run/’correr’, yell/’gritar’, dance/‘bailar’), and unaccusative verbs – those that involve a patient subject (e.g., fall/‘caerse’, sink/‘hundirse’, disappear/‘desaparecer’). Syntactic analyses propose that the grammatical subject of unaccusative verbs is in fact initially represented in complement position and then moves to pre-verbal position. In this study we ask what cues are available to Spanish-acquiring children to be able to form these two categories (and derivations). After carefully analyzing over 10,000 utterances with intransitive verbs produced by parents and children, we have been able to identify a four robust features: (i) subjects are more likely to be inanimate with unaccusative verbs than with unergative verbs, (ii) unaccusative verbs appear more frequently with perfective aspect morphology, (iii) subjects are more likely to appear post-verbally with unaccusative verbs than with unergative verbs, and (iv) the anticausative clitic ‘se’ is more likely to appear with unaccusative verbs than with unergative verbs. We presented these results at the 2023 LSA annual meeting.

We are currently running a set of experimental studies that examine at what age Spanish-speaking children start making use of these cues to categorize intransitive verbs.

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Publications

• Mateu, Victoria, Laurel Perkins, & Nina Hyams. (2023). Learning unaccusativity: Evidence for split intransitivity in child Spanish. Proceedings of the 97th Annal Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. 8(1). [link]