The development of object knowledge and word learning are critical early components of the broader language acquisition task, and understanding the processes by which infants construct their first linguistic representations is vital to our understanding of language...

Variations in word order are often used for communicative purposes such as to relate events to each other in terms of their timing or causality (e.g. After you've had your dinner, finish your drawing, or We need a coat on because it's raining). In complex adverbial...

This project investigated the comprehension of relative clauses in English-speaking children and adults. In a series of 5 experiments across two studies we tested 300 participants, 183 of whom were children between the ages of 4 and 9.Participants took part in a...

This project studied the development of tag questions. Tag questions are frequently used in British English to convey a wide range of pragmatic functions, for example as politeness devices concerned with facilitating continuing conversation, indicating uncertainty,...

The aim of this project was to investigate whether and how learning the lexical items and grammatical structures that we typically use to talk about mental states and perspectives(e.g. What do you THINK? HE KNOWS it’s in the red box) help children to understand mental...