Hello! I am a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in Linguistics at William & Mary. I specialize in first language acquisition, learnability, syntax, and semantics .
My research addresses how learners map structure to meaning, and how syntactic information is processed and integrated by adults and children. My dissertation (2022) focused specifically on syntactic bootstrapping as it extends to the adjectival domain.
​My research is often at the intersection between language acquisition and computational modeling -- exploring not only how best to represent the learning process, but why babies and LLMs are not in fact alike!
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Specific topics that I work on include word learning, degree constructions and gradability, ellipsis, verbal agreement, and movement.
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I have ongoing collaborations with Athulya Aravind (MIT), Forrest Davis (Colgate), Viviane Deprez (Rutgers), Galia Bar-Sever (Pomona), and Kate Harrigan (W&M).​
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I am developing a workbook for teaching CHILDES / corpus methods to undergraduates -- available Fall 2024. Please email me if you would like a copy!
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Recent and Upcoming Events:
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"Not-So-Faultless Disagreement: How Gradient Subjectivity Influences Adjective Ordering," to be presented at the LSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia (with Galia Bar-Sever and Amelia Lewis). January 2025.
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"Humans vs. Machines: Comparing Adjective Learning Performance," to be presented at the LSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia (with Forrest Davis). January 2025.
"Rage Against the Machine: Comparing Human and Model Performance with Adjective Learning," to be presented at BUCLD 49 (with Forrest Davis). November 7-10, 2024.
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"Mapping For-Phrases in Degree Constructions," to be presented at the 16th Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL). Prague, Czech Republic. July 15-19, 2024.
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"What Language Models Can Tell Us About Learning Adjectives," talk presented at the 2024 LSA Annual Meeting in NYC (with Forrest Davis). January 4-7, 2024.
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"Non-Canonical Agreement in Early Grammar," talk presented at BUCLD 48 (with Athulya Aravind). November 4-6, 2023.
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"Children's Interpretations of Referential and Expletive 'It'", talk presented at BUCLD 48 (with Athulya Aravind). November 4-6, 2023.
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"Agreement and Expletive There in Acquisition," talk presented at the Language Acquisition Workshop of New England (LAWNE) (with Athulya Aravind). April 15, 2023.
Invited talk at Harvard University (Language and Cognition Talk Series). "Word Learning in the Adjectival Domain: Categorizing Subjective Adjectives." March 7, 2023.
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Recent / Forthcoming Publications:
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Gotowski, Megan & Syrett, Kristen. (Accepted). Using Syntax and Semantics to Acquire Subjective Adjective Meanings. Language Acquisition.
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​Gotowski, Megan. (Under Revision). Adjectival Subcategorization in Child-Directed Speech. [contact me for the MS]
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Gotowski, Megan & Davis, Forrest. (Under Revision). The Gap Between Modeling Input and Modeling Acquisition.
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Gotowski, Megan & Aravind, Athulya. (In Prep). Children's Interpretations of Expletive and Referential Forms.
Messick, Troy, Deprez, Viviane & Gotowski, Megan. (2023). P-stranding, evasion, and what they (might) mean for ellipsis identity. Current Issues in Comparative Syntax 2: Boundaries of Ellipsis Mismatch.
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Deprez, Viviane & Gotowski, Megan. (2022). Probing the impact of register, familiarity, and information state on the form of French-questions. Quaderni di lavoro ASIt.
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