Our Research

Here, we ask the following questions: How do children learn the meaning of words? What kind of calculations do they perform over the linguistic input they receive? How does the language they are acquiring influence their linguistic and cognitive development over time? Are the meanings children acquire the same as or different from the ones that adults have for the same words? How can we account for these meanings by appealing to advances in linguistic theory?

The answers to these questions fascinate us, because they reveal fundamental characteristics of the language acquisition process, how language and cognition interact, how humans interact with and learn from their environment, and what our cognitive and computational capacity truly is.

One line of our word learning research has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF grant BCS 2016963)

Here, we ask the following questions: Do children and adults assign the same interpretation to the sentences they hear? Are they aware that a sentence can have more than one meaning as a result of particular grammatical operations? Are they constrained by their grammar to only get the meanings that are grammatical (and not those that aren’t)? How does the need to process sentences in real time in the course of a conversation interact with this more abstract linguistic knowledge?

In our work with preschoolers and their adult counterparts, we investigate how participants interpret adjectives such as big, long, tall, and round, number words such as two, quantifiers such as every, and even seemingly simple words like ball and cup. All of these words are especially interesting because of the restrictions they have in their interpretation and application, how they are interpreted in a discourse context, and the way in which they interact with other words in a sentence.

It may seem unsurprising that we ask college-age students to interpret sentences with complicated linguistic objects like relative clause, verb phrase ellipsis, partitive constructions, appositives, auxiliary modals, pronouns, and so forth. After all, they’ve had many years of experience and training in using and interpreting these linguistic items. However, we also ask 3- to 5-year-olds to interpret many of the same constructions, and in many cases, they perform just as well as their older counterparts! When they get derailed or arrive at an unexpected interpretation, we get excited, because this mistmatch between children and adults may tell us something about the development of language, the development of the sentence processor, the nature of the input, acquisition of other knowledge, or any combination of these things.

Here, we ask the following questions: How does the meaning we assign to words and sentences depend on, or at least minimally interact with, the context in which the speaker delivers an utterance? How do a speaker and listener negotiate meaning as language unfolds? What aspects of contextual information are children sensitive to (or not)? How do the linguistic context and the extralinguistic context interact and feed into sentence-level interpretation? 

The study of linguistic meaning in context is called ‘pragmatics’. We study how pragmatics interacts with syntax (the structure of language) and semantics (the meaning of words and phrases). What is especially interesting to us is findings cases where children are just as facile as adults in their reasoning about meaning in context, and others where they aren’t quite patterning with adults yet, or without additional support.

Here, we ask the following questions: When we produce a sentence, do we provide listeners with surface-level cues to sentence meaning in the form of prosodic and acoustic information? If we do, can and do listeners use this information to arrive at the meaning we intended? Does the grammar require a particular prosodic contour for particular sentence types? If so, can and do we override this requirement as a result of other (perhaps non-grammatical) factors? Do children, like adults, recognize a benefit to altering the sound quality of their speech for the purpose of clear communication in a discourse context?

In some of our work, we investigate the relationship between sound (prosody and phonetic information) and meaning. In some cases, we are interested in how syntactic information can be captured or realized by surface-level cues. In other cases, we are interested in how speakers can favor a sentence interpretation using such cues, and how their chosen production also reflects other salient information about the discourse. In other studies, we look at how prosody interacts with word meaning.