What we do

last updated: Feb 10, 2019

At the Child Language Lab, we are interested in how children learn language. Languages are complex systems that many adults find quite difficult to learn. Small children on the other hand seem to have a remarkably easy time acquiring languages. We want to know: how do they do that?

Acquisition of Rules and Variation

One thing we are especially curious about is what patterns in rules across languages can tell us about how children acquire these rules. Languages of the world have many differences, but the kinds of rules that emerge cross-linguistically are often strikingly similar. We want to know whether these similarities reveal something about the linguistic and cognitive biases that the youngest human learners have. Are certain kinds of rules and structures common because these are the patterns children can learn best?

We’re also interested in how children acquire rules when those rules don’t always apply. For example, in English, the rule we use to make nouns plural is to add -s (dogs, cats, friends, houses…), but sometimes we don’t use this rule (mice, geese, feet). How do children figure out when they can apply a rule and when they can’t?

Parent education and outreach

We’re committed to making our research accessible to families and educators in the Philadelphia area. We focus especially on teaching parents that they can have a positive impact on their child’s language development by engaging with their children in everyday life. Simply talking, reading, and singing to children provides the rich and loving interactions they need to acquire language and other important cognitive skills.

Collaborations

We also engage in lots of collaborations with researchers at Penn and at other institutions. Some of these projects include:

Collaborations

Empirical Yang
with Charles Yang and Elissa Newport

Constraints on regularization
with Elissa Newport

Acquisition of form-class categories
with Patricia Reeder, Dick Aslin, and Elissa Newport

Causative overgeneralization
with Ava Irani

Statistical learning in patients with aphasia
with Mackenzie Fama, Peter Turkeltaub, and Elissa Newport