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Current Research Projects

In the Language and Learning Lab, we are conducting studies on children's early cognitive development. We are especially interested in how children begin to use symbols to communicate and learn about the world. Several projects in this line of research are currently underway in our lab.

Learning about absent objects and events

Our knowledge would be very limited if we had to rely only on what we experience directly rather than on what other people tell us. For instance, we all know about prehistoric animals and water on Mars although none of us have seen them. Developing the ability to understand references to absent objects, people, and events is a major cognitive achievement, one that enables children to think and communicate about what is not perceptually present.  In a series of studies, we are investigating the emergence of this ability in very young children. We are especially interested in children’s ability to update their knowledge about the world based on what other people tell them.

Learning from picture books: Infants, toddlers, and preschoolers

Parents and preschool teachers assume that young children learn useful information from the books to which they are exposed and that they generalize that information beyond the pages of the book.  Surprisingly, almost no research has examined these basic assumptions.  We simply do not know, for example, how likely it is that a young child who has learned to identify a picture of a kangaroo in a book and has also learned that mother kangaroos carry their babies in a pouch would generalize that knowledge upon first encountering a real kangaroo in a zoo. The focus of this line of research is the process by which young children acquire and extend new knowledge from picture book experiences, with the goal of identifying factors that facilitate or impede this process. 

Early word learning and communication

Successful communication depends, among many things, on our ability to determine which entity another person is referring to.   Speakers often use indefinite expressions, such as “it”, “one”, “that”, “those” to ask for referents.  These expressions can be confusing without the ability to use other sources of information to disambiguate the speaker’s intended meaning.  For instance, to clarify what “it” means one often has to reflect back on what the speaker previously said in the conversation.  We are currently examining the extent to which infants can use information from the shared conversational background to clarify what another person is currently referring to. The ability to use shared information to make inferences about others’ references is an essential pragmatic skill which enables us to participate effectively in dialogue.



We are also part of the Child Development Labs at Boston University. Check out the CDL website to learn about more research going on in the Psychology Department at Boston University!

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