My primary research interest is in the acquisition of language by young children, in the relationship between language acquisition and language structure, and in the acquisition of language by children and adults after damage to the brain. 

See the Learning and Developmental Plasticity webpage for information about this overarching research program.

One line of research focuses on the language acquisition process, investigating how learners go from linguistic input to knowledge of the grammar of a language. Part of this research examines the input children receive for learning English, and analyzes the extent to which this input is capable of supporting the rules children form. Another part of this research examines unusual children around the world acquiring creole languages, where input is extremely reduced or inconsistent, but where children seem to acquire complex rules nonetheless. This research includes studies of the emergence of young sign languages in Nicaragua, Japan, Israel, and the U.S.

We also study both normal acquisition and creolization using miniature languages presented to learners in the lab, where we can control both the input and the structure of the language, to see how the learning process actually works. Understanding this learning process (which we call “statistical learning”) involves identifying the particular computations learners make in analyzing the language, and also understanding the constraints and biases in these computational processes that may give rise to phenomena like creolization.

A second line of research concerns maturational effects on language learning, comparing children to adults as first and second language learners, and asking why children, who are more limited in most cognitive domains, perform better than adults in language acquisition. These studies involve the acquisition of signed and spoken languages at varying ages.

We also study human learners acquiring musical and other nonlinguistic patterns to see where the constraints on sequential learning differ across domains.

A long-term interest concerns understanding why languages universally display certain types of structures and considers whether constraints on pattern learning in children may provide part of the basis for universal regularities in languages of the world.

My newest area of research examines children and adults acquiring – or reacquiring – language after injury to the brain. We are studying recovery from perinatal stroke in children and comparable ischemic strokes in adults, asking whether it is true, as has been claimed, that children recover language much better than adults, and if so, what mechanisms underlie this process that may help us to improve stroke recovery in adults.

I am an Assistant Professor of Neurology and Linguistics. My research investigates the acquisition of language by healthy children.

One line of research focuses on the learnability of complex grammatical patterns. We develop linguistically sophisticated theories of how children might acquire specific types of linguistic representations from exposure to particular types of sentences. We then test these hypotheses experimentally in miniature language learning experiments, which allow us to completely control the input to which learners are exposed.

A second line of research focuses on language universals and learning biases. All natural languages have certain commonalities; where do these come from? One possibility is that there are biases in the way humans learn due to how our brains are organized, and that these biases affect how a language is represented in the minds of learners. In that case, natural languages might have certain common properties because learners introduce those properties when they are learning a language. To explore this possibility, we create miniature languages that are either like or unlike natural languages in certain ways, and then we ask how these languages are learned by children and adults. These studies illuminate the nature of children’s and adults’ learning biases and the ways in which these biases shape language structure.

My most recent work examines a phenomenon known as memory consolidation. Research on nonlinguistic memory has shown that that initially fragile memories can be strengthened, and sometimes changed qualitatively, over time and during sleep. We are asking how memory consolidation shapes linguistic knowledge during language learning by children and adults.