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Our laboratory focuses on the very origins of language learning. How do children find the units (sounds and words) in the language stream? How do they learn the meanings of the words? How do they learn to understand sequences of words when they appear in sentences? How do parents and siblings help children figure out what the language they are hearing is about? These are just some of the questions that have absorbed us over the years.

Language is a combination of sounds, meanings, and grammar. We are particularly interested in the precursors of these elements, and the processes involved in language learning. For example, how do infants make sense of events? Before infants can assign words to meaningful elements in events, they need to divide up their world correctly. To use a verb, for example, they must be able to find who is doing the action, and who (or what) is receiving the action. Finally, we ask questions about when and how children become sensitive to word combinations that carry meaning (grammar). The difference between “Big Bird is tickling Cookie Monster” and “Cookie Monster is tickling Big Bird” is an important one, as it tells who did what to whom. We have found that even before children can produce two-word combinations in their own speech, they can understand the differences in these sentences. In short, we examine all aspects of language development and have contributed important findings to the literature in our field.

We start early! Children between the ages of 4 months and 10 years come into our lab to participate in studies, and sometimes we even test adults. We start early because so much is taking place in babies’ heads that we cannot see or hear.

At the moment, we are obsessed with trying to understand how children learn verbs. We found, with our collaborators in Japan (Mutsumi Imai and Etsuko Haryu) that verb learning is very difficult for young children. Children start out, around the world, learning more nouns (e.g., dog, shoe) than verbs. The verbs that do appear in their earliest vocabularies (e.g., eat, go, sit) name frequent actions that are used in fairly narrow contexts. We want to understand why some verbs are easy to learn and others are hard – even for older children. A new line of research in our lab has to do with how children understand verb metaphors. A sentence like, “He vacuumed the milk up with his mouth” turns out to be hard for children to understand even at the age of 6!