What is that thing? Distributional bootstrapping of determiner semantics | Dr. Ana T. Pérez-Leroux (UToronto)

How do children learn the meaning of demonstratives? Previous work has focused on joint attention or on the distal/proximal contrast, by-passing their contribution to determined reference. Our experiment with novel nouns (Chen et al. 2025) suggest adults (and to a lesser degree, children) rely on affordances (proximity) and speaker gaze orientation. Input to demonstratives must be multimodal, including both distributional information and gestures, i.e., the “demonstration” element of exophoric uses. I discuss previous literature on distributional bootstrapping of definites / indefinites and share ongoing results (Chen et al., in preparation) on the distribution of modifiers and co-speech gestures with demonstratives, definites and indefinites. 

About the speaker:

Dr. Pérez-Leroux is a Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, and Chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Toronto. She is also the receiver of the 2025 Prix National d’Excellence/National Achievement Award by the Canadian Linguistics Association​. Her research seeks to understand how children (monolingual and bilingual) learn the syntax and semantics of the smallest and silent components of sentence grammar, including determiners, prepositions, number, tense, mood and aspect, null objects and subjects; and how grammatical complexity emerges from the developmental interaction among the various components.