Developmental Psycholinguistics Lab
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.
To learn more about the DPL, visit the website here.
Directors: Dr. Angeliki Athanasopoulou & Dr. Dimitrios Skordos
Where: CHD 506
Phonological Development Group
Faculty: Angeliki Athanasopoulou
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.
Students: Summer Abdalla (MA), Madeline MacLean (BA Hons), Anika Rogalski (BA)
Semantic and Pragmatic Development Group
Faculty: Dimitrios Skordos
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.”
Students: Cheryl Iwanchuk (MA), Rowan Sali (Honour’s Student)
Developmental Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting
The members of DPL meet once a month to discuss current research on lanuage acquisition. To learn more, or if you are interested in joining our meeting, please email Dr. Angeliki Athanasopoulou.