At the LEARN Lab, we think that learning language is one of children’s most fascinating and complex achievements. Our team works with students and faculty both within and beyond the NYU community to explore this early development.
Children seem to effortlessly build their vocabularies in the first years of life—not just words like “ball” and “mommy” but also harder words that denote abstract and relational concepts like “hug,” “lunch,” and “pretend.” Our research asks how children accomplish this.
What kind of language do children hear from their caregivers and how do they process this language in real-time?
We ask caregivers to play games or tell stories with their children, and we use eye-tracking technology to analyze the children’s eye gaze as they listen. We study neurotypically developing children as well as autistic children and late talkers.
How do children learn the meanings of words?
While a lot of research has asked how children learn names for concrete objects like toys, we are particularly interested in how they learn harder words, like verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and abstract nouns. We ask children to watch silly videos or play games with us to see what kinds of information they use to figure out the meanings of words. Because different languages have different properties, we also study these issues in children acquiring languages other than English, including Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Turkish. See our Collaborators page to see some of the amazing researchers we’ve worked with around the world.
What kinds of meanings are easy or difficult to learn?
Are some semantic elements easier to acquire than others, such as manner-of-motion or change-of-state? These studies use analyses of children’s existing vocabulary knowledge as well as experimental studies probing their acquisition of new words and their non-linguistic construal of events.
