Category: Research project

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...

Language knowledge and use are key predictors of school readiness, literacy development and academic attainment (Duncan et al., 2007). One of the major contributors to early language development relates to the characteristics of the Home and Language Learning...

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 You need a coat on because it's raining). In complex adverbial...

In this work package, we constructed a new computational model that explains how children discover new words and become faster at recognising these words across development. When listening to a conversation in an unfamiliar language, we find it difficult to pinpoint...

As babies and toddlers learn language, they also learn to crawl, walk, explore and play. As children’s bodies develop, they actively engage with their world and independently choose what to learn from. The vast majority of what children learn is via this...

In this work package, we used corpus analyses and eye-tracking to understand how children learn to favour contextual information over lexical information in their interpretation of simple and complex sentences, a development critical to children’s ability to...

In this Work Package we developed a new cross-linguistic model of the pattern of verb-marking error in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Children with DLD show different patterns of error depending on the language...