Research

The main focus of our research is how young children learn their first languages.

There are three main topics that we are investigating at the moment.

• How do children learn semantic properties of the functional lexicon?
• Examples: definiteness, plurality, comparatives, implicatures and presuppositions.
• How do properties of the input, particularly its variability and reliability affect the acquisition process?

Much of our research is cross-linguistic. Currently we are studying language acquisition in the following languages:

• English
• Latin American Spanish (Argentinian and Paraquayan)
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Mandarin