Language Development Department

Language is a uniquely human, complex communication system learnt apparently effortlessly in the first few years of a child’s life. Our goal is to discover how children achieve this. We build, develop and test process models and theories that address the central question of first language acquisition: How do children’s learning mechanisms exploit information in different environments to build mature linguistic knowledge? This work is supplemented by a department-wide Innovations team, whose research focusses on building big data research tools for the automated collection, coding and analysis of child language data.