About

The Language Acquisition Lab at the University of Illinois, Department of Psychology, investigates how infants and children learn to speak and understand their native language. Established in 1989, the lab's research focuses on understanding how sounds are combined to form words, how words are combined to create sentences, and how sentences convey meaning. The lab seeks to discover what young children at various ages know about the words and rules of their native language, as well as the learning mechanisms that enable this development. Their studies involve young children, adults, and computational modeling to provide a comprehensive understanding of language acquisition.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Machine Learning
• Psychology
• Internal medicine
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Medicine
• Endocrinology
• Biology
• Philosophy
• Chemistry
• Immunology
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Action anticipation based on an agent's epistemic state in toddlers and adults

  2025-09-09 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind? This multi-lab collaboration examined whether 18- to 27-month-olds’ and adults’ anticipatory looks distinguish between two basic forms of epistemic states: knowledge and ignorance. In adults (n = 703, 68% female), we found clear evidence that they do: they showed simple goal-based action anticipation and differentiated between knowledge and ignorance conditions. In toddlers (n = 521, 49% female), results were less conclusive. While demonstrating goal-based action anticipation, they did not differentiate between knowledge and ignorance as predicted. Future research can explore adults’ sensitivity to more complex epistemic states like true/false beliefs and clarify whether toddlers’ results reflect competence or performance limitations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Syntactic Adaptation and Word Learning in 3‐ to 4‐Year‐Olds

  Language Learning · 2024-07-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract In a recent study, preschoolers adapted their syntactic expectations about a familiar phrase in French; this adaptation affected later word learning. In two experiments, we probed the generality of this finding by replicating the experiment and extending it to a different expression in English. We examined the ambiguous phrase the baby , which can be followed by nouns ( the baby monkeys ) or verbs ( the baby sleeps ). In induction trials, the baby consistently preceded either familiar nouns (noun condition) or verbs (verb condition). In later novel‐word trials, children in the verb condition were more likely to interpret novel words following the baby ( The baby gorps! ) as verbs than were children in the noun condition. In Experiment 2, a modified design isolated the effect of experience with the critical phrase from possible effects of task structure, and an added baseline condition showed the adaptation effect to be asymmetrical, suggesting frequency or surprisal effects on adaptation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Action anticipation based on an agent's epistemic state in toddlers and adults

  2021 · 31 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Epistemology

  Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests that they do. But a growing body of failed replication studies raised questions about the paradigm’s suitability. In this multi-lab collaboration, we test the robustness of spontaneous ToM measures. We examine whether 18- to 27-month-olds’ and adults’ anticipatory looks distinguish between two basic forms of an agent’s epistemic states: knowledge and ignorance. In toddlers [ANTICIPATED n = 520 50% FEMALE] and adults [ANTICIPATED n = 408, 50% FEMALE] from diverse ethnic backgrounds, we found [SUPPORT/NO SUPPORT] for epistemic state-based action anticipation. Future research can probe whether this conclusion extends to more complex kinds of epistemic states, such as true and false beliefs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The dynamicity of acute ozone-induced systemic leukocyte trafficking and adrenal-derived stress hormones

  Toxicology · 2021 · 32 citations

  • Endocrinology
  • Internal medicine
  • Immunology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• BabyBERTa: Learning More Grammar With Small-Scale Child-Directed Language

  2021 · 73 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Computer Science

  Transformer-based language models have taken the NLP world by storm. However, their potential for addressing important questions in language acquisition research has been largely ignored. In this work, we examined the grammatical knowledge of RoBERTa Using the behavioral probing paradigm, we found that a smaller version of RoBERTa-base that never predicts unmasked tokens, which we term BabyBERTa, acquires grammatical knowledge comparable to that of pre-trained RoBERTa-base -and does so with approximately 15X fewer parameters and 6,000X fewer words. We discuss implications for building more efficient models and the learnability of grammar from input available to children. Lastly, to support research on this front, we release our novel grammar test suite that is compatible with the small vocabulary of child-directed input.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pulmonary and vascular effects of acute ozone exposure in diabetic rats fed an atherogenic diet

  Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology · 2021-01-30 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What’s New to You? Preschoolers’ Partner-Specific Online Processing of Disfluency

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2021-01-08 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Speech disfluencies (e.g., "Point to thee um turtle") can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner's disfluency based on their estimate of that partner's knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while children's eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naïve experimenter; in Experiment 2, the test-trial speaker had been one of the child's partners in entrainment and had seen half of the tangrams (either animal or vehicle tangrams). When hearing disfluent expressions, children looked more at a tangram that was unfamiliar from the speaker's perspective; this systematic disfluency effect disappeared in Experiment 1 when the speaker was entirely naïve, and depended on each speaker's entrainment experience in Experiment 2. These findings show that 4-year-olds can keep track of two different partners' knowledge states, and use this information to determine what should be difficult for a particular partner to name, doing so efficiently enough to guide online interpretation of disfluent speech.

  PublisherDOI

• How do the object-file and physical-reasoning systems interact? Evidence from priming effects with object arrays or novel labels

  Cognitive Psychology · 2021 · 12 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Children's attribution of disfluency to different sources.

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2020-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Disfluency in speech leads listeners, even two-year-oldchildren, to expect the speaker to refer to novel and discourse-new objects. Previous evidence suggests this link betweendisfluency and discourse novelty is not driven simply bytracking of co-occurrence statistics connecting disfluency withreference to a new object, but also by integrating extra-linguistic information about the speaker’s perspective. Weasked whether children can attribute a speaker’s disfluency todifferent sources – language planning difficulty vs. distractionfrom the conversation. We tested children’s processing ofdisfluency when interacting with an engaged versus adistracted speaker. When the engaged speaker was disfluent,children looked more at a novel and discourse-new image thanat a familiar and just-named image, consistent with the existingliterature. This disfluency effect was attenuated when thespeaker was distracted, suggesting that four-year-old childrencan flexibly attribute a speaker’s disfluency to different sourcesin online interpretation of disfluent speech.

  Publisher

• On the Semantic Content of Subcategorization Frames

  2020-08-20 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper investigates the relations between the meanings of verbs and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The investigation is motivated by the puzzle of how children discover verb meanings. Well-known problems with unconstrained induction of word meanings from observations of world circumstances suggest that additional constraints or sources of information are required. Five experiments are presented which investigate the hypothesis that the closer any two verbs are in their meaning, the greater their overlap should be in their licensed syntactic structures.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R55HD034715

  NIH · $100k · 2000

• NIH Grant R01HD044458

  NIH · $1.4M · 2012

• Verb learning and the early development of sentence comprehension

  NIH · $2.8M · 2007–2021

• Verb Learning and The Early Development of Sentence Comprehension: Experimental and Computational Studies

  NSF · $391k · 2006–2010

• Verb Learning and The Early Development of Sentence Comprehension: Experimental and Computational Studies

  NSF · $190k · 2014–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Dan Roth

  10 shared

• Yael Gertner

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  8 shared

• Michael Connor

  7 shared

• Isabelle Dautriche

  Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive

  6 shared

• Perrine Brusini

  University of Liverpool

  6 shared

• Anne Christophe

  École des hautes études en sciences sociales

  6 shared

• Hyun-joo Song

  6 shared

• Barbara A. Church

  Georgia State University

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  University of Pennsylvania