Child Language Lab

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The Child Language Lab, led by Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth and Dr Nan Xu Rattanasone, studies the process of child language acquisition. Our goal is to understand the nature of language development in children in order to inform theories of language acquisition and more targeted language therapies, providing an evidence base for health and education policy.

Our research group studies language development in infants and children, including speech production and planning, perception, comprehension and processing. We work with diverse populations including monolingual and bilingual children and those with hearing loss.

We focus primarily on issues at the phonetics/phonology/morphology interface with implications for early literacy development. We use a range of bespoke and clinical assessments (language, cognition, social development), as well as technology that examine language processing as it unfolds over time, including eye-tracking, EEG, and behavioural measures.

The Child Language Lab is associated with the Centre for Language Sciences (CLaS) at Macquarie University and the Macquarie University Hearing Research Centre.