What We Do

In the Cognitive Science of Language Lab at Cornell University, we aim to produce an integrated account of the evolution, acquisition and processing of language. Our research is conducted within a unified framework for understanding language across multiple timescales: the timescale of thousands of years, over which languages themselves evolve; the timescale of years, over which children acquire the language of their community; and the timescale of seconds, in which particular utterances are spoken and understood. We approach language using a variety of methods, including neuroimaging, eye-tracking, statistical learning experiments, psycholinguistic studies, corpus analyses, and computational modeling as well as with different subject populations, ranging from infants to adults.