About

Géraldine Legendre is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include adult and child (morpho-)syntax, the role of optimization in formal models of variation, and the application of Optimality Theory in syntax and language acquisition. She investigates models of the interfaces, such as mappings between lexical semantics and syntax, syntax and prosody, and information structure and syntax. Her work also focuses on cross-linguistic variation in syntax and morphology, with particular emphasis on clitics and related topics in French, Romance, and Balkan languages. Additionally, she explores the general cognitive architecture underlying the language faculty.

Research topics

• Natural Language Processing
• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Mathematics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy
• Chemistry
• Cognitive psychology
• Epistemology
• Theoretical computer science

Selected publications

• Optimality Theory in Syntax

  Elsevier eBooks · 2026-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The relationship between working memory, production, and comprehension: evidence from children’s errors in complex wh questions

  Journal of Child Language · 2025-01-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  English-speaking children sometimes make errors in production and comprehension of biclausal questions, known as "Scope-Marking Errors". In production, these errors surface as medial wh questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? (Thornton, 1990)). In comprehension, children respond to questions like How did the boy say what he caught? by answering what was caught (de Villiers & Roeper, 1995). These errors resemble wh-scope marking questions, attested in languages like German. Together, these errors suggest temporary adoption of multiple UG-licensed grammars (e.g., Yang, 2002). However, Lutken et al. (2020) found that children who make these errors in production do not necessarily make errors in comprehension and vice versa. They suggest these errors stem from children's immature processing mechanisms. This article examines children's production, comprehension, and processing capabilities, specifically working memory (WM). We find a correlation between WM and error rate and suggest separate causes for production and comprehension errors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A multidimensional perspective on the acquisition of subject-verb dependencies by Haitian-Creole speaking children

  Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages · 2023-08-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The present multidimensional study investigates the acquisition of pronominal subject-verb dependencies in Standard Haitian Creole (HC). A corpus analysis confirms that HC subject pronouns are phonological clitics in the target grammar and that their reduction is optional and unpredictable. The comprehension and production of dependencies involving these subject pronouns in 20 preschoolers acquiring HC as their first language were investigated. While the production of third person singular and plural subject pronouns l(i) and y(o) reveals early mastery of adult constraints on their phonological reductions, the systematic assignments of l(i) to singular subjects vs. y(o) to plural subjects of the verb in the syntactic dependency emerge later, in both production and comprehension. The few syntactic contexts in which HC-learning children show evidence of comprehension involve full forms, rather than phonological reductions. Possible factors that explain these findings include the relative unpredictability of their forms and the linguistic status of HC pronouns.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Does D Select the CP in Light Verb Constructions? A Reply to Hankamer and Mikkelsen 2021

  Linguistic Inquiry · 2022 · 13 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Mathematics
  • Psychology

  In this response to Hankamer and Mikkelsen (H&M) 2021, we clarify the meaning of the definite article the in out-of-the-blue occurrences of English light verb constructions such as make the claim. While H&M view these as purely uniqueness-requiring determiners (as opposed to purely anaphoric ones in non−light verb constructions), we classify them as instances of Carlsonian weak definites (e.g., Carlson et al. 2006), which presuppose neither uniqueness nor anaphoricity. This clarification casts doubt on H&M’s idea that the D in light verb constructions selects the descriptive CP, which serves to uniquely specify the intended referent. Crosslinguistic data (from the Dravidian language Kannada) also serve to question the relationship between D and CP claimed by H&M. We conclude that D does not directly select the CP in light verb constructions. Nevertheless, these CPs do empirically behave like syntactically selected complements. We suggest that this is because, if the light verb construction is taken as a whole—that is, the light verb + the weak definite nominal—its complement selection properties altogether parallel those of the corresponding lexical verbs. We propose a compositional analysis that reinforces this conclusion.

  PublisherDOI

• Syntactic Intervention cannot explain agreement attraction in English wh-questions

  2022-02-11

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  A core goal of psycholinguistics is to account for how syntactic constraints -- those that govern whether sentences in a language are grammatical or not -- are enforced during real-time processing. One such constraint in Mainstream American English is subject-verb agreement, which requires the verb's number feature matches that of its subject, irrespective of the number of any other noun phrases in the sentence. Past work has demonstrated that participants often make errors when enforcing this constraint when distractor noun phrases, called attractors, have a number feature different from the subject. Franck, Lassi, Frauenfelder & Rizzi (2006) propose an account of agreement errors based on the position of a potential attractor in a sentence's structural derivation in modern syntactic theory. In this paper, we argue that their account predicts that we should see no agreement attraction for a particular construction in English, a Discourse-linked wh-question. In a high-powered self-paced reading study, we test that prediction and find a robust attraction effect, suggesting that syntactic intervention is not a necessary condition for attraction errors in comprehension

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Infinite use of finite means? Evaluating the generalization of center embedding learned from an artificial grammar

  2021 · 5 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Artificial Intelligence

  Human language is often assumed to make "infinite use of finite means" - that is, to generate an infinite number of possible utterances from a finite number of building blocks. From an acquisition perspective, this assumed property of language is interesting because learners must acquire their languages from a finite number of examples. To acquire an infinite language, learners must therefore generalize beyond the finite bounds of the linguistic data they have observed. In this work, we use an artificial language learning experiment to investigate whether people generalize in this way. We train participants on sequences from a simple grammar featuring center embedding, where the training sequences have at most two levels of embedding, and then evaluate whether participants accept sequences of a greater depth of embedding. We find that, when participants learn the pattern for sequences of the sizes they have observed, they also extrapolate it to sequences with a greater depth of embedding. These results support the hypothesis that the learning biases of humans favor languages with an infinite generative capacity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Converging Evidence of Underlying Competence: Comprehension and Production in the Acquisition of Spanish Subject-Verb Agreement

  Journal of Child Language · 2021-07-16 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring Mexican Spanish gain competence with 3 rd -person SV agreement, testing production as well as comprehension in the same children aged between 3;6 and 5;7 years, and whether comprehension of SV agreement is modulated by the sentential position of the verb (i.e., medial vs. final position). Accuracy and sensitivity analyses show that comprehension performance correlates with SV agreement production abilities, and that comprehension of singular and plural third-person forms is not influenced by the sentential position of the agreement morpheme. Issues of the appropriate outcome measure and the role of structural familiarity in the development of abstract representations are discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The acquisition of <i>wh-</i>questions: Beyond structural economy and input frequency

  Language Acquisition · 2021-09-28 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children’s acquisition of wh-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 wh-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of wh-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of wh-in-situ, probe questions (PQs), has been left out from most discussions despite its presence in child-directed speech. Unlike wh-in-situ echo questions (EQs), PQs are used to request new information, and parents frequently use PQs and fronted information-seeking questions in alternation. The fact that PQs share the pragmatic space with fronted wh-questions while involving fewer syntactic operations and exhibiting lower input frequency allows us to test both structure-based and frequency-based theories of syntax acquisition. Our comprehension task with 3;06–5;06-year-olds confirms that children accept and understand PQs as information seeking. On the other hand, results from a production task show a strong avoidance of wh-in-situ, which is in line with reported elicited data from French-speaking children. We reason that a structural economy-based approach alone is not sufficient to account for children’s disfavor of wh-in-situ. Depending on the input frequency and consistency, as well as the number of variants licensed by the grammar of a given language, children may treat part of the input as uninformative and initially only learn from higher-frequent, more regularized input. Their intake is thus selective.

  PublisherDOI

• Clausal Restructuring in the complex nominal

  2021-03-26

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Restructuring of infinitival complements within complex VPs, or Verbal Restructuring, is a well-known cross-linguistic phenomenon. In contrast, there is a dearth of empirical evidence for restructured complements within complex NP/DPs, even though the theory posits equivalence between nominal and verbal domains. Here, we provide novel evidence for the presence of restructuring within complex NP/DP complements in Kannada light verb constructions, and claim on this basis that clausal restructuring within the nominal domain is a possibility in natural languages.

• Covert movement in English probing wh-questions

  Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2020-03-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Besides fronted information-seeking questions, English also allows for two types of wh-in-situ ones: echo questions, which are used to request a repetition or a clarification of a previous utterance, and probing questions, which are often used in quiz shows, classroom settings, and child-directed speech to “prompt” the addressee for an answer. An acceptability judgment task shows that PQs with multiple wh-phrases get a significantly lower acceptability score than echo questions with multiple wh-phrases despite their similarity in surface structure, which suggests a syntactic difference below the surface. Independent syntactic evidence confirms the result and further suggests that while echo questions involve no syntactic movement (Dayal, 1996), probing questions involve covert wh-movement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Cross-Linguistic Investigations of the Acquisition of Subject-Verb Agreement

  NSF · $402k · 2013–2018

• The nature of first word combinations: insights from the comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement and tense-marking by young native French-speaking children

  NSF · $328k · 2005–2011

Frequent coauthors

• Thierry Nazzi

  65 shared

• Jennifer Culbertson

  53 shared

• Paul Smolensky

  34 shared

• Elena Koulaguina

  Université Paris-Saclay

  33 shared

• Nayeli Gonzalez‐Gomez

  Oxford Brookes University

  28 shared

• Isabelle Barrière

  Molloy College

  18 shared

• Louise Goyet

  Université Paris Nanterre

  12 shared

• Yoshiro Miyata

  Chukyo University

  10 shared

Labs

• Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins UniversityPI