PhD, Psychology
In my research, I am really interested in how children learn language from the complex world around them. I have explored how elements of children's input—the language they hear, the people they hear it from, and the places they hear it in—influence word learning. For example, I ask questions like how does the input children recieve impact which words children learn and also what they learn about the meaning of those words? The goal of this work is to better understand how to best support children's successful word learning and language development.
For my dissertation, I am currently working on several exciting studies exploring the impact of environmental context on young children's developing semantic knowledge using a variety of experimental methods including eye-tracking and head-turn preference procedure.