Projects
The lab explores two main questions about language. First, we ask what aspects of the information available in natural speech are useful to language learners at different ages. Second, we ask how children and adults represent the language that they hear and whether those representations change over the lifespan. Currently, we are examining these issues in two domains.Words with Multiple Meaning
Many accounts of how children learn words rest on the assumption that each word will have one meaning and each meaning will have one word. There's only one problem with that assumption: it isn't true. Languages are full of words that have more than one meaning. How children learn about those words isn't well-understood. In our lab, we're working on the following studies.
1. What information in the speech that children hear might help them learn that a single word can have more than one meaning? Because previous research suggests that homophones differ in their length depending on the intended meaning, we're examining child-directed and child-produced speech to see whether that information is available to learners. We're using previously recorded conversations and lab-based production to examine these questions. Click here for an example of one of our production tasks.
2. Can children hear the length differences that distinguish meanings of homophones? Do they use that information to decide which meaning a speaker intended? Do they use it to learn the meanings of new homophones? Click here to hear examples of ate and eight and see whether you can tell the difference.
Representing Sentence Structure
Learning a language requires learning more than just words. Children also have to figure out how to put those words together in meaningful and appropriate ways. The order of words matters in English and how children learn appropriate word orders and the meanings associated with those word orders is a complex issue. In our lab, we look at sentence structure in a couple of different ways.
1. How do children represent and interpret the sentences that they hear? Do those representations depend on the specific words or do they have a more general idea about the structure of the sentence? To study these questions, we look at priming effects, or how the structure of one sentence might influence expectations about the structure of an upcoming sentence. How do we measure priming? We look at eye movements. For a picture of our eye-tracking set-up, click here.
2. Can children use knowledge of sentence structure to interpret sentences that contain new words? To test this, we ask children to make a decision about which video is described by a sentence that contains a new word or to produce a sentence that contains a word they have just learned. To see an example of the videos children might watch, click here.