Welcome to the Language Lab!
We are interested in studying how infants tune into their native language(s) and how children eventually develop the implicit rules of language that allow them to comprehend and produce grammatical sentences. To do this we study infants’, toddlers’, and young children’s language perception and production abilities.
Recent Study Results
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How do children use syntax to learn verb meanings?
Previous work finds that children use the syntax of a sentence with a new verb in order to make a guess about its meaning. One hypothesis proposes that children do this by using the number of arguments in a sentence: they expect a sentence with two arguments (a subject and an object) to describe an …
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How many participants do infants represent when they view events in the world?
In order to learn the meaning of a new verb, like take, children need to decide what kind of event in the world it labels, and whether that event tends to have one, two, or more core “participants.” Here, we asked how many participants infants readily perceive when viewing events in the world, independent of …
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Can 19-month-olds process wh-questions incrementally?
When adults hear a wh-question with a fronted object, like What is she wiping with the cloth?, they interpret what as the direct object of the verb wipe rapidly, as the sentence is unfolding in real-time. In our prior work, we found that 18-month-olds are able to represent the structure of these questions. Here, we …
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