Developmental Linguistics Research Group

Research Areas

First language acquisition

  • phonetic and phonological development
  • social cognition and early syntax
  • differentiation and reciprocal effects between the bilingual child's grammatical systems
Second language acquisition and bilingualism
  • the nature of ultimate attainment in near-native speakers
  • interaction between different types of cognitive faculties engaged by second language learners and bilingual speakers
  • the acquisition of lexical semantic knowledge and its interface with syntactic knowledge
  • processing in L2 syntax and its interfaces
  • the nature of lexico-phonological representations in second language
Phonological development in atypical population
  • developmental dyslexia
  • speech processing and autism
First language attrition
  • selectivity of attrition on L1 syntax
  • asymmetrical effects of attrition in the syntax-semantics interface
Diachronic language change
  • dispersion of syntactic change through a population
  • optionality resulting from diachronic change