Language Acquistion
We study how children between the ages of 2 and 12 years acquire their first language and how that interacts with other aspects of their cognitive development. We use a variety of behavioral tasks including eye-tracking to test children’s language production, perception, and comprehension. The lab houses two research groups.
About
Developmental Psycholinguistics Lab
To learn more about the DPL, visit the website here.
Directors: Dr. Angeliki Athanasopoulou & Dr. Dimitrios Skordos
Location: CHD 506
Phonological Development Group
Our group studies how children develop the sound system of their language, focusing on prosodic patterns larger than the word. Our studies are typically cross-linguistic investigations of children’s production and perception abilities. Other main topics of research is the information pre-linguistic children use at the very beginning to break into their language (bootstrapping theories) as well as the role of a changing input in language acquisition.
Faculty: Angeliki Athanasopoulou
Students: Ushmam Alam
Semantic & Pragmatic Development Group
Our main research question is how children learn the meanings of words and phrases in their language and how they use their language-learning abilities to think about and understand context and the intentions of others. Projects in the group include the acquisition of quantifiers and logical connectives as well as the acquisition of spatial terms and motion event and how that interacts with memory and non-linguistic cognition.
Faculty: Dimitrios Skordos
Students: Cheryl Iwanchuk (MA), Rowan Sali (MA)
Publications
Celeste Olson, Suzanne Curtin, and Angeliki Athanasopoulou (2024). Processing of Compound and Phrasal Prosody in (Canadian) English. Speech Prosody. https://www.isca-archive.org/speechprosody_2024/olson24_speechprosody.html
David Sidhu, Angeliki Athanasopoulou, Stephanie Archer, Natalia Czarnecki, Suzanne Curtin, and Penny Pexman. (2023). The Maluma/Takete Effect is Late: No Longitudinal Evidence for Shape Sound Symbolism in the First Year. PLOS ONE, 18(11): e0287831. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287831
Susan Geffen, Kelly Burkinshaw, Angeliki Athanasopoulou, and Suzanne Curtin (2022). Utterance-initial prosodic differences between statements and questions in infant-directed speech. Journal of Child Language. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000922000460
Dimitrios Skordos, Myers, and David Barner. (2022). Quantifier spreading and the question under discussion. Cognition, 226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105059
Dimitrios Skordos, Roman Feiman, Alan Bale, and David Barner. (2020). Do children interpret ‘or’ conjunctively? Journal of Semantics. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz022
Dimitrios Skordos and David Barner. (2019) Language comprehension, inference, and alternatives. In C. Cummins & N. Katsos (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198791768.013.1