This work package focused on how children use semantic cues such as animacy, causality and intentionality to develop linguistic concepts and knowledge.1. Infants’ visual preferences and their relation to later language learningAlthough we know quite a lot about...

Humans are unique in their desire and motivation to share experiences and draw attention to objects and events ‘for sharing’s sake’. Indeed there is a strong theoretical argument that what is unique to human evolution and to the development of language is the...

Many languages mark nouns with inflections that reflect the role of the noun in the sentence (its ‘case’). In English, only pronouns show case-marking (e.g. he, him, his to mark nominative, accusative and possessive, respectively). But children learning other...

The aim of this project was to investigate the balance between lexically-specific and abstract syntactic knowledge, and, in particular, how the latter develops from the former. In order to do so, we focussed on the well-studied and relatively circumscribed domain of...

How do children learn the grammatical categories of their language? For example, how do children learn that dog is a Noun and chase is a Verb? Recent research with computer models of language learning has shown that one way of doing this is to group words together on...

This project considered how children learn to inflect verbs to convey different meanings such as person (1st vs 2nd: in English, "I" vs. "you"), number (singular vs. plural: in English, "is" vs. "are") and tense (present vs. past: in English, "is" vs. "was").  English...