My research investigates early word learning, both from a descriptive/ecological and an experimental approach.
In my ecological work, I explore the characteristics of naming events in the real world. As part of this line of work, I have contributed data to the SAYcam project, which includes longitudinal headcam video and audio footage from three children. Recordings were sampled for about 90 minutes twice a week from 7 to 30 months of age. See here for some media coverage of this project.
In my experimental work, I’m interested in what infants and young children learn about words beyond the word-referent association.
Trade-offs in attention to word-referent mapping vs. the world
The study of word learning traditionally investigates how infants map a label (e.g. “dog”) onto a referent (e.g. furry, slobbery four-legged animal). Activities like pointing and naming objects facilitate this mapping process. Does drawing attention to the word-referent label come at the expense of encoding other information? A new line of research in my lab is investigating how the form of sentences and images in a learning moment affects what children learn.
Development of Semantic Relationships
I am interested when semantic relationship knowledge emerges and how children learn the relevant semantic relationships in their language and the world. In this line of work, I use a combination of methods, including the Headturn Preference Procedure, Looking-While-Listening (Intermodal Preference procedure), and free association tasks. My postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia investigated the differences in semantic relationships knowledge between bilingual and monolingual infants.
Memory and Early Word Learning
I am also interested what early memory development can tell us about how children learn words. While many word learning studies explore how young children encode novel words, there is very little known about how children remember those new words over time. I am interested in using what we know about infant memory to inform the study of word learning. My dissertation project explored the differences in what children remember about a novel word referent vs. a novel word's context.