My research program focuses on various aspects of infant cognitive development and early word learning. I am particularly interested in the interaction between cognition and language during the first few years of development. Much of my work has focused on early spatial cognition as well as the early acquisition of spatial language.

One goal of my research is to outline the degree to which infants' perceptual and cognitive abilities provide them with the ability to acquire the meanings expressed across language-specific semantic categories (e.g., "in", "on", "out" and "off"). I also explore how experience with spatial language can serve to bolster the spatial categories infants form. This line of work has been extended to examine how parent interactions and infants' play behavior contribute to the earlier acquisition of particular spaital concepts.

Recent research has begun to examine other spatial skills in infants with the goal of tracking the developmental trajectories of these spatial skills. We again strive to explore the role of spatial language in the development of these abilities. My students and I have working to develop a new measure of infant spatial cognition that can be used to track the development of this ability from infancy into early childhood.

I also examine aspects of language development, with a focus on the early acquisition of spatial language in infatns and toddlers. My students and I have examined how infants acquire semantic spatial categories, exploring this question in both experimental and naturalistic studies. In collaboration with Dr. Soonja Choi and Dr. Katharina Rohlfing, we have examine the nature of mothers' input to infants during their second year. We are comparing infants from English-, Spanish-, Korean- and German-speaking families.  

In other work, my students and I have begun to explore how infants and toddlers learn labels in a second language, examining how much exposure to a novel language (such as Spanish) is necessary for infants to begin to demonstrate comprehension of words in the unfamiliar language.

Finally, one line of research is exploring links between infant cognitive and socio-emotional abilities.  In collaboration with Gary Evans and several graduate students, we are documenting relations between infants' early cognitive abilities (such as language and attention) and their socio-emotional abilities (such as emotion understanding and self-regulation), exploring this relation in infants from middle- and low-income families.

Infant cognition

Word learning

Infant categorization

Infant spatial cognition

Second language learning in infants