We are conducting several cross-linguistic as well as bilingual studies to investigate early language development.

We are presently interested in the following questions:

From what age do children use mrophosyntactic information in the input to learn new words?

From what age do children learn new words based on the function of the objects (i.e., how they work), rather than the appearance (i.e., what they look like)?

Does input contain sufficient semantic and morphosyntactic information to enable children to distinguish fundamental lexical categories such as nouns and verbs across languages?

To what extent are children capable of extracting and using such information from input in learning these lexical categories?  Is their use of gestures related to the acquisition of these lexical categories?

How do children learn verb argument structures?  Do children acquiring a null argument language such as Japanese learn verb argument structures differently from those acquiring an overt argument language such as English or French?  How about children acquiring both types of languages simultaneously?