Researchers in the lab specialize in child monolingual and bilingual, and adult language learning. They study children longitudinally in their natural environment over the first 3-4 years of their lives, or cross-sectionally across more age groups, and involving larger groups of learners. They may also study grammatical aspects of the language, semantic aspects, or indeed look at the level beyond the sentence, and understand how learners organize information across clauses and in discourse.
Some researchers take a linguistic perspective, whereas others take a psychological perspective, and as the department is oriented in both theoretical and applied directions, it also is involved in a number of projects that strive to innovate language teaching and assessment through cross-fertilization of linguistic research and teaching and assessment techniques. Finally, the lab also has researchers in psycholinguistics, some of whom look at non-typically developing children who experience specific problems around the use and production of language.
