research

Broadly, my research asks:

What is the role of evidence, or the language input which must be processed to develop language competence, in the acquisition of complex syntactic structures?

*How might we characterize and quantify evidence?

*How does looking at the evidence differently change the way we perceive the learning problem?

Given that there’s cross-linguistic variation and variation in a child’s input, how do children learn which verbs participate in any given complex syntactic structure (e.g. passives, double-object constructions, etc.).

*How can learning the lexical semantics of a verb be informative for children in such a learning task?

Specifically, my research asks:

What can input frequency and lexical semantic features tell us about how children acquire the English verbal passive?

I use a combination of in-depth corpus analysis, computational modeling, behavioral experiments in order to investigate these questions.

Here, you will find research materials that I have made accessible to the public broken down into behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and corpus research. I have also provided the appropriate citations should you wish to make use of this work. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.