
Research Interests: In every human
language, a complex grammatical system underlies the social act of
communication. Yet almost every child acquires this system in just a
few short
years, an impressive cognitive feat. In fact, recent evidence suggests
that infants possess the beginnings of
grammatical knowledge, well before they are producing multi-word
utterances.
Yet very little is known about the earliest stages of this process of
grammatical acquisition. My research program examines what infants know
about
the grammar of their language, and how they acquire it.