Our research
We research across a range of linguistic areas
Learn about our researchExploring how we acquire language
We investigate aspects of children’s language knowledge and processing abilities, and the implications of language input from parents and carers.
Our researchers investigate the acquisition of language in:
- typically-developing children
- children with specific language impairment/developmental language delay
- bilingual children
- children with hearing loss.
Many of our studies focus on English, but we also have current research investigating Mandarin Chinese-speaking children and adults.
We also investigate how aspects of language, eg working memory etc, contribute to the learning of other skills, such as reading.
About us
Our Linguistics department has one of the highest concentrations of researchers in child language in the world. Our researchers are grouped within:
Areas of interest
We are interested in the following areas of research:
Acquisition of phonology and morphology
Most researchers working in this area are members of the CLL.
We use behavioural methods to explore how children’s knowledge of words and sentences develops over time, identifying the phonological/prosodic issues that govern word formation, and the implications for the use of grammatical function words and inflectional morphology.
Much of this research:
- explores the nature of the input (infant and child directed speech)
- uses speech perception/comprehension experiments (including eye-tracking)
- uses acoustic analysis of children’s productions, especially in pre-schoolers, including bilingual children and children with hearing loss.
Our goal is to better understand the processes underlying the development of phonological, morphological and lexical representations in order to guide the construction of more effective language interventions for children at risk for language delay.
Acquisition of syntax and semantics
Most researchers who study syntax and semantics are members of the LAL.
Many research projects are couched within the biolinguistic approach to language. We investigate what aspects of children’s knowledge of acquisition of syntax and semantics are guided by abstract linguistic knowledge, and what aspects are learned from the input.
We are interested in how children map their innate linguistic knowledge onto the input, and how children understand structures for which there is little evidence in the language of parents and carers.
To get an in-depth understanding of children’s linguistic knowledge we carry out behavioural experiments with pre-school children, using the production technique of elicited production and the comprehension task known as the truth value judgement task.
Language processing in the brain
Most researchers in this area are members of the CLL.
The goal of this research is to better understand how the brain processes different types of phonological, lexical and morphosyntactic information in real time (using EEG/MEG), and how this varies as a function of population (eg L1 vs L2 English-speaking adults, monolingual and bilingual school-aged children).
The findings provide critical insight into how learners/language users process different types of information during sentence comprehension.
Some of this research is carried out concurrently with eye-tracking – either in the visual or auditory domain.
Our people
Meet some of the academics involved in this research.
Researchers
- Dr Titia Benders
- Professor Felicity Cox
- Distinguished Professor Stephen Crain
- Professor Linda Cupples
- Dr Ben Davies
- Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth
- Dr Iain Giblin
- Dr Rebecca Holt
- Dr Jae-Hyun Kim
- Dr Loes Koring
- Dr Isabel O’Keeffe (Child Language Lab Coordinator, Centre for Language Sciences Coordinator)
- Associate Professor Mridula Sharma
- Professor Rosalind Thornton
- Dr Nan Xu Rattanasone
- Dr Ivan Yuen