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!
Specific topics that I work on include word learning, degree constructions and gradability, ellipsis, verbal agreement, and movement.
I currently have ongoing collaborations with Athulya Aravind (Yale), Forrest Davis (Colgate), Kate Harrigan (W&M), and Kristen Syrett (Rutgers).
Recent and Upcoming Events:
“Bootstrapping at the Interface: Learning from Multiple Cues,” to be presented at BUCLD 51 (with Kate Harrigan and Forrest Davis). Boston, MA. November 5-8.
"Testing Silent Structural Alternatives in French P-sluices," talk 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.
Recent / Forthcoming Publications:
Gotowski, Megan & Harrigan, Kaitlyn. (accepted) Hardest Words: Tracking Adjectives with Multiple Frames. Language Acquisition.
Aravind, Athulya & Gotowski, Megan (accepted/in press). Non-canonical Agreement in Early Grammars. Linguistic Inquiry. (Link to paper on LingBuzz).
Gotowski, Megan & Davis, Forrest (2026). The Gap between Humans and Language Models: Analyzing Adjective Performance. Language Acquisition.
Gotowski, Megan & Aravind, Athulya. (2025). No Referential Bias in Children's Interpretation of 'It' or 'There'. Language Acquisition.
Gotowski, Megan. (2025). Adjectival Subcategorization in Child-Directed Speech. Language Acquisition. [awarded Best Paper in Language Acquisition by an untenured linguist]
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.