What we do

When and how children learn grammatical categories

Words belong to part-of-speech categories such as noun and verbs, sentences have subjects, predicates, objects and other elements. We are interested in how children uncover these categories, at what age they can use them to comprehend sentences, what kind of information they use to learn about them.

Predictive language processing and learning

When we listen to other people, we form expectations and predictions of their upcoming words. That is why we are sometimes surprised or confused when we hear something unexpected. The predictions can be helpful when we study the knowledge of grammar because they can reveal people’s knowledge. But also, people sometimes learn best when they encounter unexpected outcomes, and this probably plays an important role in language learning.

Inflected forms of words: storage or construction?

How do people store their knowledge of inflected word forms, such as chairs, mom’s or walked? Are these stored as separate words in their own memory “space”? Or are they created from their basic forms (chair, mom, walk) when needed, using linguistic rules?

Sentence recall: language, memory, and language impairment

In the sentence recall task, people hear sentences and their task is to immediately repeat each sentence. The task is a very sensitive measure of language skills, although it seems to be a memory task. Understanding the role of language in the task helps in developing better assessment tools, but it also addresses important fundamental questions about the structure of human memory and language system.