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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"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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"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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Recent / Forthcoming Publications:
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​​Gotowski, Megan. (2025). Adjectival Subcategorization in Child-Directed Speech. Language Acquisition.
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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. (Under Review). Children's Interpretations of Expletive and Referential Forms.
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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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