Welcome to the Language and Cognition Lab at Penn State! The central goal of the lab is to understand the learning mechanisms that facilitate language acquisition. We are interested in whether and how these learning mechanisms change over the course of the lifespan, as well as identifying critical differences that facilitate language acquisition in human children and adults but are absent in other species.
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One of the central research programs in our lab involves studying statistical learning. Statistical learning is the ability to implicitly learn about the patterns present in the input (such as a speech stream), and this type of implicit learning helps infants begin to solve challenges inherent to early language acquisition. For example, speech streams typically are continuous streams of sound yet we perceive them as being comprised of discrete words. How do young infants know where words start or stop, given the lack of reliable pauses in the speech stream? Prior research findings (from many labs) suggest that tracking rudimentary probabilities of one sound following another may provide a foothold for learning. Our lab has sought to understand how infants, adults, and nonhumans are able to track more than one input stream at a time. This is relevant for infants being raised in bilingual environments, yet also addresses questions about variability in the input that are relevant for monolinguals as well.
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Another newer line of research investigates the relationship between language and motor planning. As Karl Lashley suggested in 1951, humankind's capacity for complex sequences of action require a plan. This is true for the action sequences required to make a pot of coffee and for the language production involved in forming a sentence. Notwithstanding, several traditional views of language posit that it is unique from other cognitive domains. Thus, one of the goals of our research is to explore possible commonalities across language and action, focused specifically on sequencing constraints. This line of research involves human adults, children, and nonhuman primates. We believe that our research will help elucidate which aspects of language may be unique, both with respect to other human activities, as well as nonhuman primate sequential behaviors. |
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