Language Acquisition
Verb Learning
How do children learn the meanings of verbs? This is a question that's puzzled researchers for years. While objects can be ostensively labelled
(e.g. This is a dog)
, actions are seldom labelled like this. In fact, verbs are only rarely uttered at the time the action is being performed, tending to describe actions that have already happened, or are still to occur. Moreover, while specific constraints seem to limit the way a new object label will be applied (e.g. to a whole object that does not already have a label), verbs tend to be more abstract, and take a very specific perspective on an event. Somehow, the young learner must arrive at the same perspective that the speaker intended. Clearly, multiple constraints will align themselves to guide the learner's interpretations, but this process will rely crucially on the child's ability to observe and appreciate the particular perspective that is highlighted by any given verb. In other words, the learner needs some sort of "zoom lens" to help her zero in on the perspective a speaker has opted to take.
My research investigates the role the attentional and intentional states of a speaker play in a learner's ability to arrive at this aligned perspective. An appreciation of the intentional and attentional information others convey is burgeoning from infancy, and provides an elegant window into the perspective of a speaker for any given utterance. This source of information should then allow a young language learner to keep up with the language he hears around him. Ongoing studies are investigating young children's ability to use eyegaze and gesture information to successfully arrive at the correct (intended) parse of syntactically ambiguous structure, as well as the ability to use these informational sources to correctly interpret a new verb when such syntactic information is not available.
Language Production
Event Perception and Verb Choice
Language acquisition consists of recovering structure and meaning from utterances produced by speakers, so it is easy to see how intricately intertwince language production and language acquisition are as linguistic processes. Thus, the factors underlying linguistic choices and language production should be of crucial interest to the language learner. That is, language learning is so often a process of figuring out which aspects of the world a speaker has elected to comment on that language learners should be attempting to attune themselves not only the attentional and intentional states of speakers, but the same conceptual factors that led speakers to produce the utterance at hand in the first place (see Bloom, 2002 for a fabulous explanation and illustration of this view).
Despite our sense of perception as instantaneous and holistic, a great deal of visual processing is done over successive fixations to various elements within the world, and the way we examine a visual stimulus and its internal elements can play a significant role in the way it is conceptualized and described. For example, the picture 
to the left can be perceived (and described) as a rabbit or a duck, depending on the perspective the viewer takes on it. Research has shown that a given interpretation of this sort of ambiguous figure can be induced by drawing the viewer's attention to particular regions of the picture (critical features of the given interpretation) (see, e.g. Georgiades & Harris, 1997).
My research investigates whether these same attentional forces are at work in the perception of events. Verbs are thought to be more difficult to learn than nouns because (amongst other reasons) they don't simply label objects in the world, but rather take a perspective on them. Just as in the rabbit/duck image above, the scene 
to the right can be perceived (and described) in two ways - as a chasing or a fleeing event - depending on the perspective the viewer takes on it. Once the viewer has taken a perspective, this can be communicated easily to the listener by simply using the appropriate verb, and describing the scene as either "chasing" or "fleeing." But if the learner is to determine the meaning of a verb, she must know which perspective her speaker is taking on the world as he speaks. My research has shown that the way we attend to such events predicts the way we will describe them, thus offering the language learner a potential cue to the perspective her speaker has taken on the world, and the meaning of the verb he has used. In addition to exploring the degree to which the language learner can use a speaker's attentional patterns to infer his perspective on events, ongoing research is investigating the speed with which the "gist" of such scenes can be extracted by the viewer, and whether and how the language learner may be able to access the conceptually salient factors that led to the description produced by the speaker in the first place.