tl;dr: I am interested in early online language comprehension and word learning, and in how children’s developing event representations contribute to these processes. My research focuses on reference comprehension in the toddler and preschool years and employs a wide range of experimental methodologies including eye-tracking, language production, and corpus analysis techniques. I approach these questions from a Psycholinguistic lens and am particularly interested in exploring mechanisms that underly language comprehension and learning.
Overview of Research Interests
In a few short years children learn thousands of words and a productive language system that allows them to produce and comprehend sentences that they've never heard before. One challenge that children face in acquiring this complex web of linguistic knowledge is to link words with their real-world referents. For instance, how do children learn who 'he' is or what a new word 'dax' means? In these situations, adult listeners use knowledge of linguistic structure as well as real world knowledge about the events under discussion to determine reference. My research explores how children utilize both mechanisms to make these links in real time as sentences unfold.
In a few short years children learn thousands of words and a productive language system that allows them to produce and comprehend sentences that they've never heard before. One challenge that children face in acquiring this complex web of linguistic knowledge is to link words with their real-world referents. For instance, how do children learn who 'he' is or what a new word 'dax' means? In these situations, adult listeners use knowledge of linguistic structure as well as real world knowledge about the events under discussion to determine reference. My research explores how children utilize both mechanisms to make these links in real time as sentences unfold.
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Broad research questions in this area include:
(1) To what extent might situation models be involved in early language comprehension and learning? (2) How can we disentangle the tight correlation between referential patterns that can be learning through experience with language versus what is inferred on the basis of a cognitive representation of the message being conveyed? (3) What sources of individual variation are there in children's ability to make event-based pragmatic inferences during online language comprehension? |
 Presenting at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 2025
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