Current Projects

Our lab conducts experimental and corpus-based research with children and adults. Some of our ongoing research projects are listed below. For information about others, please send us an inquiry: ldclab.boulder@colorado.edu

"'More is Up': Investigating the Vertical Number Line in Preschoolers" 

Together with graduate student Norielle Adricula and a team of undergraduate students, the project (funded by the Spencer Foundation) will investigate the development of space-number mappings in preschool children. The project aims to find out whether children who have no training in mathematics nevertheless conceptualize numerical magnitudes using vertical space. The findings will expand our understanding of language and numerical cognition in children, and will have implications for how to adapt early mathematical instruction to children's natural aptitude.

The Development of Spatial Language in Children acquiring English

How do children learn to categorize spatial relationships using language? While there is a fascinating literature on children's early sensitivity to spatial concepts such as containment, 'tight-fit', support, etc. in the first two years of life, we know less about changes in how children organize their spatial semantic categories over several years. In order to investigate this issue, we are conducting a cross-sectional elicited production study to explore how children construct and reorganize their spatial semantic system over time. Using a standardized set of stimuli, we elicit children's use of spatial prepositions in English (e.g., in, on,under, above, etc.) at different ages and compare their patterns of use with those of adult speakers of the same language. In addition to experimental data, we also investigate the use of spatial prepositions in corpora of naturalistic child-caregiver interactions available in the CHILDES database. Eventually we plan to extend our study to monolingual and bilingual learners of other languages.

Argument Structure and Case-Marking in Child Hindi and Tamil

This is a long-running project investigating how split-case-marking systems develop in children acquiring languages that have such systems. Both Tamil and Hindi exhibit so-called 'split-accusativity' in the case-marking of its direct object arguments (differential object marking), and Hindi also has a 'split-ergative' pattern (differential subject marking). In our research, longitudinal corpora of naturalistic child-caregiver interactions in Hindi and Tamil are transcribed, coded, and analyzed to explore the development of case-marking patterns in three children acquiring Hindi and three children acquiring Tamil.

Collaborative Project: The Crosslinguistic Acquisition of Sentence Structure (CLASS)

One of the remarkable feats of children acquiring a first language is the ability to create abstract patterns based on concrete utterances encountered in the input. For instance, children learn that verbs occurring in the intransitive construction (the window broke) can be extended to the transitive (causative) construction (she broke the window) and vice versa. In addition to making generalizations, children also have to learn when not to generalize (e.g., giggle can only be used in the intransitive and cannot be causativized in English, e.g. *she giggled her sister). How do children acquiring languages with different causativization strategies learn to construct abstract generalizations, and retreat from overgeneralizations? Our lab is participating in a large crosslinguistic study of sentence structure acquisition in English, Kiche Maya, Japanese, Hindi, and Hebrew in a project led by Ben Ambridge (University of Liverpool) and including an international cast of researchers. More details can be found here.

Multimodal Cues in Verb Learning

An influential account claims that whereas children have a “coalition of cues” available during word learning, they initially weight perceptual cues more, only later attending to linguistic and social cues (Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek 2007). But do children also rely on perceptual cues over linguistic cues when extending words to unfamiliar contexts, and does this bias lessen with age? We investigate this hypothesis by examining children and adults’ weighting strategies when extending verbs to a variety of novel contexts where cues are placed in conflict.

Collaborative Project: Information Status and Word Order in Speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese

When communicating with their interlocutors, speakers mention 'old' entities (mentioned in prior discourse) first, before they refer to entities that are 'new' (introduced for the first time). Prior research has demonstrated a robust preference for the 'old-before-new' ordering preference in different languages. But recent studies conducted in our lab suggest that such a preference is not a default, universal preference. Children exhibit the opposite, 'new-before-old', preference in phrasal conjuncts as do older adults acquiring Spanish. And English-speaking adults show a reduction in their preference for the 'old-before-new' order when placed under a cognitive load. In collaboration with Dr.Chen (CSU, Fresno), we are currently extending our research on information status and word order by investigating child and adult speakers of additional languages, including Chinese and Spanish.