Research

Language Learning Across Development

How do learners find structure in a complex linguistic environment? We study the mechanisms that allow infants, children, and adults to detect patterns in speech and use those patterns to learn words and other aspects of language. A particular focus of our work is statistical learning (the ability to discover regularities from experience) and how prior linguistic knowledge shapes what learners notice and learn.

Our research asks not only what people can learn, but also why the same input may lead to different learning outcomes across individuals, developmental periods, and language backgrounds.

Language in the Everyday Environment

Language learning does not occur in a vacuum. We are interested in the language children encounter in their everyday lives and how characteristics of that input relate to development.

Our work on infant-directed speech uses naturalistic recordings of interactions between infants and caregivers to examine the acoustic and linguistic structure of speech in children's environments. We are particularly interested in understanding which features of everyday language input provide useful information for learning and how these features vary across speakers and contexts.

We also study the broader social environment surrounding language development, including how children's books represent people, identities, and social roles and how those patterns may shape children's expectations about the world.

Learning to Read and Write Across Languages

Written language presents learners with a different set of challenges from spoken language. Much of our work focuses on Chinese reading and writing, where characters contain multiple layers of phonological, semantic, and statistical information.

We investigate how readers organize characters into words during sentence processing, how different components of characters contribute to recognition and comprehension, and how instructional practices such as character spacing and stroke-order training affect learning. This work allows us to ask broader questions about how properties of a writing system shape the cognitive processes involved in literacy.

Learning a New Language

Learning another language provides a powerful window into the flexibility of the language-learning system. We study how adults learn unfamiliar speech sounds, words, and writing systems, with a particular emphasis on Chinese as a second language.

Our research examines how previous language experience, statistical information, perceptual abilities, and the format in which language is presented influence learning. By connecting basic research on learning and cognition with questions about language instruction, we aim to better understand both how second languages are learned and how learning environments can support that process.