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 (Yale), Forrest Davis (Colgate), Viviane Deprez (Rutgers), Kate Harrigan (W&M), and Troy Messick (Rutgers). ​
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I am developing a workbook for teaching CHILDES / corpus methods to undergraduates -- Please email me if you would like a copy!
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Recent and Upcoming Events:
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"Subcategorizing Adjectives with Multiple Frames," to be presented at BUCLD 50 (with Kate Harrigan). November 6-9, 2025.
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"Being (an LM) and Nothingness: How Models Interpret Expletive Forms," to be presented at BUCLD 50 (with Forrest Davis). November 6-9, 2025.
Testing Silent Structural Alternatives in French P-sluices," talk to be presented at the 55th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Linguistics (LSRL) in the Dominican Republic (with Viviane Deprez and Troy Messick). September 2025.
Mind the Gap: Comparing Human and Model Performance with Adjectives," invited talk at George Mason University, April 14, 2025.
"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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Recent / Forthcoming Publications:
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​​Gotowski, Megan. (2025). Adjectival Subcategorization in Child-Directed Speech. Language Acquisition.
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Gotowski, Megan & Syrett, Kristen. (2024). Using Syntax and Semantics to Acquire Subjective Adjective Meanings. Language Acquisition.
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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