The overarching goal of my research is to study the information that is available to the language learner in the input, and discover how maturational constraints and human learning biases affect the acquisition of that information. I'm interested in the circumstances under which child and adult learners utilize distributional information -- the patterning of particular aspects of language in a corpus of input -- in order to acquire high-level language structures like grammatical categories and hierarchical phrase structure. Furthermore, I am interested in testing how the application of a distributional learning mechanism by many generations of learners may have shaped modern language, and the extent to which this mechanism is domain general.
Follow the links below to learn more about these projects.
Hierarchical Structure Learning
