About
My research is situated at the intersection of language acquisition, cognitive development, and human learning. Much of my recent research focuses on the mechanisms supporting earl word learning. Words are universal building blocks of the world’s languages, but novice learners must discover tens of thousands of arbitrary mappings between words and their referents, specific to their language. Infants begin learning a handful of common words by 6 months of age. However, most work on lexical development has focused on skilled word learning in toddlers, and very little is known about the nature and origins of word-learning mechanisms in the first year of life. My current projects aim to 1) provide comprehensive test of how experience with statistical cues relevant to word-form segmentation contributes to the development of early word-learning skill, 2) reveal how infants come to form word-object associations, and 3) determine how infants come to learn words as symbols.