LANGUAGE ACQUiSiTiON with Dick Aslin and Katherine White

Infants quickly learn to map words to meanings within the first few years of life, but how? Some of my work focuses on how infants may use cross-situational statistics and to learn words for objects and features. I'm also interested in correlations between the qualitative features of a child's language input and that child's early language knowledge. For example, how do different types of language exposure contribute to learning? Another portion of my work examines whether infants can use features typical of adult-directed speech (as opposed to child-directed speech) to infer word meanings.

LANGUAGE PROCESSiNG with Florian Jaeger, Austin Frank, and others

I'm also interested in adult and child language processing. Specifically, I'm interested in the role of high-frequency word sequences and collocations. Some of my work employs corpus-based methods to assess to what degree speakers 'chunk' frequent word combinations and what aspects of speech planning might be unit-based. I'm also interested in whether compositionality of word sequences (as opposed to just frequency) affects acquisition and production.