Developmental Psycholinguistics

The developmental psycholinguistics group focuses on the experimental study of early language acquisition, with a special focus on phonological and lexical acquisition. The long-term goal of our research program is to understand which universal abilities influence language acquisition and how these abilities interact with experience, leading to variability or similarities in the language acquisition trajectory.  We pursue a comparative psycholinguistics approach, and compare infants learning different native languages, and infants growing up multilingually, and we study populations, for whom language development is atypical. We have a special interest in understudied languages and understudied populations. For this, we extend our lab-based methods to the field (e.g., mobile eye-tracking).

Collaborative Research Centre 1287 Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Computational, and Grammatical Aspects

• C07: Limits of variability in phonotactic acquisition due to universal biases