I am a language acquisition and linguistics researcher interested in the development of pragmatic enrichment, the early acquisition of functional categories, and theoretical issues concerning the semantics/pragmatics interface. I also have an interest in statistical methods/inductive inference and various empirical and conceptual questions about input-driven learning models.

I am finishing my PhD in Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center, working with Sam Alxatib, Virginia Valian, Sandeep Prasada, Ailis Cournane and Jacopo Romoli. I did my B.CompSci/B.Arts and M.A. at the University of NSW, Australia.

My current work argues that children possess abstract syntactic categories by the time they first start producing multi-word speech, that children’s difficulties with certain scalar implicatures are the result of how they represent inexact quantities, that children give Boolean interpretations of free choice disjunctions , and that neg-raising phenomena are best understood as a type of quantity implicature. Manuscripts to appear soon!

You can reach me at aeliatamby@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Current Studies

I’m currently running an online study looking at how young kids enrich the meaning of sentences using contextual information. If you have a child who predominantly speaks English and is between the ages of 4 and 5, we’d love to have them take part. Please contact me here if you’re interested.