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My general research interests are in the
cognitive mechanisms that underlie language acquisition. One line
of research investigates the methods by which infants and very
young children acquire fundamental syntactic knowledge about the
language they are learning. Another line of work investigates
how two- and three-year olds learn the meanings of novel words.
These research programs are connected by a common question about
the nature of the mechanisms that give rise to linguistic abilities,
and the effects of environmental input on these mechanisms. A
common goal is to investigate how best to understand the similarities
and differences between language learning and learning in other
domains, and what the primary influences on language acquisition
are.
