Victoria Mateu

Education

• Ph.D. (2016). Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of California Los Angeles.
• M.A. (2013). Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of California Los Angeles.
• B.A. (2011). English Philology, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Granada (Spain)

Research

• Language Acquisition with an emphasis on Spanish and English
  • • Acquisition of morphosyntax
    • Word and morpheme segmentation in infants
    • First Language Acquisition
    • Bilingualism (in children and adults)
• Theoretical Syntax, particularly syntax of Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan)
• Language Processing

Courses

SPAN/PORTGSE M35 – Spanish, Portuguese, and the Nature of Language

Description:  Introduction to what is known about the Human Language with an emphasis on Spanish and Portuguese data. We will explore the nature of Language –what it means to know a language, how it differs from other animal systems of communication, and common misconceptions about Language and the field of Linguistics. We will critically examine the different features of language structure –phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; as well as various psycholinguistic aspects of language, including first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, language loss, language and the brain, and how language interacts with other cognitive domains.

SPAN 100B – Spanish Syntax

Description:  This course examines basic principles of generative syntax as they apply to specific syntactic structures of Spanish and English primarily. The goals of the course are: (i) to learn basic techniques of syntactic analysis (e.g. constituent analysis, proposing and justifying syntactic structures and movement rules); (ii) to gain a deeper understanding of particular aspects of Spanish syntax. No previous knowledge of (generative) syntax is assumed. Coursework emphasizes argumentation, the ability to construct and work with a formal system, and experimentation. It is taught in Spanish.

SPAN 160 – Topics in Spanish Linguistics: Child Language Acquisition

Description:  This course is concerned with the question of how children acquire their native language. After laying the theoretical framework, the course explores how children gain competence in different aspects of the language — the sound system (phonetics and phonology), word meaning (lexical semantics), word formation (morphology); and sentence structure (syntax) — on their journey towards adult competence. Beyond general theory, which transcends any one language, there will be a focus on Spanish (and other Romance languages) and English.

The course primarily considers monolingual and typical language development, but also examines “nontypical” circumstances such as acquisition beyond the “critical period”, bilingual and child L2 development, and language disorders.

SPAN 204B – (Spanish) Generative Syntax

Description:  This course examines basic principles of generative syntax as they apply to specific syntactic structures of Spanish and English primarily. The goals of the course are: (i) to learn basic techniques of syntactic analysis (e.g. constituent analysis, proposing and justifying syntactic structures and movement rules); (ii) to become acquainted with some of the theoretical principles of syntactic theory; and (iii) to gain a deeper understanding of particular aspects of Spanish syntax. No previous knowledge of (generative) syntax is assumed. Coursework emphasizes syntactic argumentation (with few ad hoc postulations), problem solving, the ability to construct and work with a formal system, and experimentation.

SPAN 256B – Studies in Spanish Linguistics: First Language Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax

Description:  This course is designed to introduce students to current acquisition theory and empirical studies (naturalistic and experimental) of Spanish (and Romance)-speaking children’s grammatical development. We investigate the more widely studied areas of (morpho‐)syntactic development such as agreement, explicit and null arguments, verb structure, A- and A’‐movement, as well as some issues in semantic/pragmatic development. We explore these topics within the context of more general questions about language development such as the role of (innate) grammatical principles, input frequency and learning, as well as various performance-related and methodological issues. Although the focus is on typically developing monolingual Spanish-speaking children, we also examine bilingual development in relation to some of these topics.

Publications

Journal Articles

Liu, Minqi, Victoria Mateu, Nina Hyams. (in press). Number, shape, and intervention effects in child Mandarin passives. Language Acquisition.

Liu, Minqi, Victoria Mateu, Nina Hyams. (2024). On the representation of implicit arguments in child grammar: Short passives in Mandarin and English. Languages 9. 236.

Mateu, Victoria & Megha Sundara. (2024). Constraints on acceleration in bilingual development: Evidence from word segmentation by Spanish learning infants. Behavioral Sciences, 14(2), 108.

Mateu, Victoria. (2022). On the acquisition of Spanish psych predicates: When intervention makes extraction of a nominative wh-phrase harder. Isogloss 8(4)/6. 1-27.

Liu, Minqi, Nina Hyams, & Victoria Mateu. (2022). The syntax and acquisition of Mandarin sluice-like constructions. Tsinghua Linguistics, 1(1), 122–171.

Mateu, Victoria & Megha Sundara. Spanish input facilitates English learning infants’ segmentation of English words. (2022). Cognition, 218, 104936.

Visser, Ingmar, Christina Bergmann, Krista Byers-Heinlein, Rodrigo Dal Ben, … Victoria Mateu, … & Martin Zettersten. (2022). Improving the generalizability of infant psychological research: The ManyBabies model. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

The ManyBabies Consortium. (2021) A multi-lab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. 4(1). 1-30.

Mateu, Victoria & Nina Hyams. (2021). Structural intervention effects in the acquisition of sluicing. Language Acquisition 28. 6-38.

The ManyBabies Consortium. (2020). Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed speech preference. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 3(1). 24-52.

Mateu, Victoria. (2019). Intervention effects in the acquisition of raising: Evidence from English and Spanish. Language Acquisition. 1-34.

Sundara, Megha & Victoria Mateu. (2018). Lexical stress constrains English-learning infants’ segmentation in a non-native language. Cognition 181. 105-116.

Mateu, Victoria. (2015). Object clitic omission in child Spanish: Evaluating representational and processing accounts. Language Acquisition 22. 240-284.

Charnavel, Isabelle & Victoria Mateu. (2015). The Clitic Binding Restriction revisited: Evidence for Antilogophoricity. The Linguistic Review 32(4). 671-701.

Book Chapters

Mateu, Victoria. (in press). The Acquisition of Syntactic Categories in a Child’s First Language. In Hilary Nesi, Petar Milin, & Cornelia Tschichold (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition. Vol. Reference Collection in Social Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Mateu, Victoria & Nina Hyams. (2021). On children’s late acquisition of raising ‘seem’ and control ‘promise’: Is a unified account possible? In Adriana Belletti & Chris Collins (eds.) Smuggling in Syntax, 222-254. Vol. in Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mateu, Victoria & Nina Hyams. (2019). On the learnability of implicit arguments. In Tania Ionin & Matthew Rispoli (eds.) Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research, 185-201. Vol. 63 of Language Acquisition & Language Disorders. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

Hyams, Nina, Victoria Mateu, Lauren Winans. (2017). Ellipsis meets wh-movement: Sluicing in early grammar. In Nicholas LaCara, Keir Moulton & Anne-Michelle Tessier (eds.) A Schrift to Fest Kyle Johnson. Linguistics Open Access Publications. 1. http://scholarworks.umass.edu/linguist_oapubs/1.

Hyams, Nina, Victoria Mateu, Robyn Orfitelli, Michael Putnam, Jason Rothman & Liliana Sánchez. (2015). Parameters in language acquisition and language contact. In Antonio Fabregas, Jaume Mateu & Michael Putnam (eds.) Contemporary Linguistic Parameters. 353-375. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Conference Proceedings

Victoria Mateu & Nina Hyams. (in press). Elided questions in child Spanish: Where do prepositions go? In Proceedings of the 49th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 49].  Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Perkins, Laurel, Victoria Mateu, & Nina Hyams. (in press). 28-month-olds use inferred thematic relations to bootstrap intransitive verb meanings. In Proceedings of the 49th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 49].  Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Pettenon, Elena, Emanuela Sanfelici, & Victoria Mateu. (in press). Intervention effects in the acquisition of Italian sluicing: The role of Number Mismatch. In Proceedings of the 49th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 49]. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Mauffray, Erin & Victoria Mateu. (2024). The acquisition of the periphrastic and se-passives in L2 Spanish: A priming and acceptability task investigation. Proceedings of the 48th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 48]. 327-340. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Liu, Minqi, Victoria Mateu, & Nina Hyams. (2023). Intervention effects in Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of passives. Proceedings of the 47th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 47]. 519-532. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Mateu, Victoria, Laurel Perkins, & Nina Hyams. (2023). Learning unaccusativity: Evidence for split intransitivity in child Spanish. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (PLSA). 8(1). 5557.

Mateu, Victoria. (2022). Object wh-questions with psych verbs are easy in child Spanish. Proceedings of the 46th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 46].  524-537. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Liu, Minqi, Nina Hyams, & Victoria Mateu. (2020). Late intervention effects in the acquisition of Mandarin sluice-like constructions.  Proceedings of the 44th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 44]. 322-335. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Mateu, Victoria & Nina Hyams. (2020). The structure of silence: A look at children’s comprehension of sluicing. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society [NELS 49]. Volume 2. 265-278. Independently published.

Mateu, Victoria, Nina Hyams & Lauren Winans. (2019). Intervention effects in early grammar: Evidence from sluicing. Proceedings of the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 42].  532-545. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Mateu, Victoria. (2018). What cross-linguistic acquisition differences can tell us about invisible syntax: The case of Spanish ‘parecer’. Proceedings of the 41st Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 41]. 481-494. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Mateu, Victoria & Nina Hyams. (2016). One is the loneliest number: The acquisition of Spanish indefinite ‘un’. Proceedings of the 6th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition: North America [GALANA 6]. 73-80. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Charnavel, Isabelle & Victoria Mateu. (2015). Antilogophoricity in clitic clusters. Proceedings of the 32nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics [WCCFL 32]. 1-10. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Mateu, Victoria. (2014). Clitic omission in Spanish-speaking children: Evaluating the roles of competence and performance. Proceedings of the 38th Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 38]. 306-318. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.