Language acquisition research at UBC focuses primarily on the development of syntax, phonology, and lexical semantics.
We study young children and adults, both first and second language learners, exploring the roles of structure and frequency of environmental input and learner biases alike in their linguistic development. In the domain of phonological acquisition, research is mostly driven by theoretical predictions of constraint-based grammars and the development and testing of learning algorithms. In the domain of syntax/semantics, we emphasize the role of input and how it interacts with learning constraints and biases. Our methods include artificial language learning, corpus studies, computational simulations, acceptability judgments, and various investigations of linguistic creativity, and we study the development of a variety of languages including English, French, Hebrew, Persian, Mandarin, and Cantonese.