Welcome to the Language Acquisition Lab of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at The Ohio State University!
Here we investigate how language develops in typically-developing adults learning a second language and in typically and atypically developing children learning first languages. Our interests center on the representation of human linguistic knowledge, and we investigate the development of these representations in the phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic domains.
Our work has applied dimensions, such as improved techniques for second language instruction and improved diagnostic measures for language disorders. These dimensions follow from our basic scientific goal of gaining insight into the nature of linguistic cognition and its interaction with non-linguistic performance systems.