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My research interests center on the question of how children learn the syntax of their native language(s).
Within this, my work addresses two high level issues and many, many smaller (but not necessarily easier!) components of these issues.
- How do children learn about the relationship between a verb and its syntactic properties (a.k.a., verb argument structure)?
- Are children's earliest syntactic representations specific to particular verbs or are they more abstract?
- What information might children use to learn the meaning of a verb?
- How do learners find out which parts of the sentence are arguments (and therefore required) and which are adjuncts (and therefore optional)?
- What information do children use to learn the relationship between the meaning of a sentence and its syntax/argument order?
- How do children sort the words they hear into appropriate grammatical categories (e.g., noun, verb, adjective)?
- What kinds of cues to grammatical category (phonological, semantic, distributional) are available in the language that infants hear?
- To what extent can these cues be used by infants to form categories?
- When cues conflict, which do learners prefer to use?
- Do infants have the same kinds of lexical categories that adults do or are there important differences that they must un-learn?
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