Emma Nguyen

#MyNameIs: em-ma win

Percy Building

Newcastle University

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

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.

I recently received my Ph.D. in August 2021 from the University of Connecticut. My dissertation is titled The predictive power of lexical semantics on the acquisition of passive voice in young children under the supervision of William Snyder, Lisa Pearl, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Letitia Naigles.

news

Dec 15, 2023	Invited talk at the Research Seminars in Linguistics at Ulster University
Nov 18, 2023	I’m co-leading the Preschool Poets event at the Being Human Festival 2023 with Rebecca Woods and Harry Man.
Jun 28, 2023	We organized the Workshop on Verbal Domains at Newcastle University
Jan 26, 2023	Invited talk at the Cambridge Linguistics Forum at Cambridge University

selected publications

LangAcq
The link between lexical semantic features and children’s comprehension of English verbal be-passives

Emma Nguyen, and Lisa Pearl

Language Acquisition, 2021

Abs Bib PDF

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}, }