I lead the Child Language Lab @ NYU [click for lab website].

I study how children learn what words and structures mean, and how this learning process relates to language change over time. My research focuses on linguistic modality (e.g., must, have to, maybe) and counterfactuality (e.g., I wish Stegosauruses were still around), areas of language that express our most complex thoughts: those about open possibilities, likelihoods, non-actual situations, imagined worlds and so on.

I am co-PI, with Valentine Hacquard (UMD) [click for her website], of the NSF-funded project “Acquiring the Language of Possibility” [click for project website] that uses modals as a testing ground to explore the precise relationships between (a) how languages differ from each other, (b) how languages change over time, and (c) how children learn language.