Welcome to our Child Language and Cognition Lab! The central goal of the lab is to understand the early learning mechanisms that facilitate language acquisition. We ask whether these learning mechanisms change over the course of the life span and are also interested in identifying the critical differences that facilitate language acquisition in human children but are absent in other species.
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 many of the challenges inherent in 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? Work by several researchers has demonstrated that tracking the probabilities of one sound following another may provide a foothold for learning. Our lab has been interested in several related issues, such as how infants, adults and nonhumans are able to track more than one input stream at a time. This is certainly relevant for infants being raised in bilingual environments, but also addresses questions about variability that are relevant even for monolinguals. Likewise, we have been studying how children integrate visual information with their auditory learning.
We are always seeking participants ages 6 months - 5 years, if you would like to participate in one of our studies with your child, please email us at infantlabpsu@gmail.com or call (814) 865-1929. You can also sign up online by filling out this form. We look forward to hearing from you!
Our lab also has openings for undergraduates (see Join the Lab tab).
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 many of the challenges inherent in 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? Work by several researchers has demonstrated that tracking the probabilities of one sound following another may provide a foothold for learning. Our lab has been interested in several related issues, such as how infants, adults and nonhumans are able to track more than one input stream at a time. This is certainly relevant for infants being raised in bilingual environments, but also addresses questions about variability that are relevant even for monolinguals. Likewise, we have been studying how children integrate visual information with their auditory learning.
We are always seeking participants ages 6 months - 5 years, if you would like to participate in one of our studies with your child, please email us at infantlabpsu@gmail.com or call (814) 865-1929. You can also sign up online by filling out this form. We look forward to hearing from you!
Our lab also has openings for undergraduates (see Join the Lab tab).