I’m interested in various aspects of the world. At different times I studied microbiology, molecular biology and genetics, ecology and systems neuroscience. Currently I’m primarily interested in the nature of the human mind and its development. How does the mind perform operations on environmental input, how does it store information, and what are the biological constraints that allow the mind to acquire these properties?

The uniquely human capacity for language offers a window into understanding the human mind, and I am interested in understanding what the capacity for human language is, both developmentally and as a full-fledged competence in adulthood. I am particularly interested in two interacting themes: (1) what aspects of language are the result of interactions among other cognitive properties like perception, memory and social cognition, and what are unique to (human) language and (2) what aspects of language and learning mechanisms are innately specified in the newborn infant and what aspects are learnt, and how.