Jeffrey Lidz

Jeffrey Lidz is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland's College of Arts and Humanities. He directs the Project on Children's Language Learning and the Infant and Child Studies Consortium, while serving on the executive committees of the Maryland Language Science Center and Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program. His research integrates syntax, semantics, and developmental psychology to investigate language acquisition mechanisms.

Jeff's research examines how infants and children construct syntactic representations through cross-linguistic comparisons (English, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Tsez, etc.), focusing on:

• Filler-gap dependencies in 18-month-olds
• Syntactic bootstrapping for verb meaning acquisition
• Cognitive constraints on quantifier interpretation
• Reflexive/pronoun binding and Principle C
• Statistical learning limitations in early language development
• Interface between Universal Grammar and input processing

Hallmarks of his work include:

• Identifying structure-dependent interpretation in infants
• Modeling parser-grammar interactions during acquisition
• Investigating psychophysics of quantification
• Exploring cross-linguistic variation in syntactic dependencies
• Training students in developmental psychology and computational methods
• Co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics

Notable awards and roles:

• Editor-in-Chief, Language Acquisition (2012-2021)
• Collaborations with institutions like Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, and University of Pennsylvania

His students have pursued careers at UCLA, Amazon, University of Toronto, and other research institutions. Current lab members work on syntactic dependencies, prosody-syntax interactions, and computational models of language learning.