Language development

In a truly incredible feat, just a few months after they are born, human babies begin to recognize words for common objects, and toward their first birthday, they utter their first words. Over the following 2-3 years, their vocabularies explode and they learn to combine words into phrases and sentences, and by 3.5-4 years of age, typically developing children can understand and express complex ideas through language. The neural infrastructure that supports linguistic ability in adults is relatively well-characterized, but how this infrastructure emerges and whether/how it changes until we reach cognitive and neural maturity remains controversial. In this line of work, we are investigating language processing in little brains in order to shed light on these important questions. We are also working on building language models that learn language in ways that are more similar to how human babies learn language, to see whether such models perform better on linguistic tasks and align better with human language processing mechanisms.