First Language Acquisition

Language acquisition researchers at UW Linguistics investigate how children acquire linguistic structures of their native language(s). We aim to shed light on a) how language experience, learning biases and cognitive maturation interact in the course of grammatical development, and b) how children learn to use their knowledge in real-time comprehension and production. To this end, we investigate children's linguistic knowledge as well as use of that knowledge through a variety of behavioral tasks and eye-tracking technique, as well as cross-linguistic comparisons.