The Form and Acquisition of Free Relatives

Clauss (2017). My UMass dissertation. 

I examine the properties of Free Relative constructions (‘Charles read what Sebastian wrote‘) in English and cross linguistically.

I look at data from child and adult language, and build a theory of the syntax of FRs that accounts for properties of the adult language, cross-linguistic variation, and children’s acquisition path.

Listening in 2020

Helfer, Mamo, Clauss, and Tellerico (2020). Published in the American Journal of Audiology.

An analysis of survey data on younger and older adult populations, examining the how experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic affected self-assessed measures of hearing effort and difficulty.

Syntactic cues alone in adjective learning

Clauss and Hartman (2015). Presentation slides from the BU Conference on Language Development.

We examine a novel word-learning experiment aimed at investigating children and adults’ ability to learn complex properties of adjectives by exposure to new words in multiple frames. We are specifically interested in “tough” type adjectives and the multiple constructions they appear in (”Cats are easy to pet’ vs. ‘It’s easy to pet cats’)