Children around the world grow up with vastly different homes, families, and social networks, but nearly all of them will grow up to be healthy speakers of a language. What about children's minds makes this possible? And how we can best support them in their journeys? 

This is what I have spent my career researching. I study children in the first few years of their lives, when their capacity for learning language is at its greatest. I hope not only to understand more about the uniquely human capacity for language, but also to provide children with the support they need to become happy, healthy speakers of their language.

I received my PhD in Psychology from Harvard University under Dr. Jesse Snedeker and Dr. Elizabeth Spelke. My dissertation addressed the influence of both heritable and environmental factors on language development in children adopted into the U.S. and children in Ghana.

Currently I am a postdoc at the Laboratory for Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics at the ENS Paris with Dr. Alejandrina Cristia.