I’m a Professor and former Canada Research Chair in Language Acquisition (2010-2020) in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. Before moving to UBC, I was in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. (The lab alums links include students I worked with there.) My research is generally concerned with language acquisition.  Mostly I am interested in the role of the input and how it interacts with what the learner brings to the table, which entails understanding both the input and the learner. I’ve worked on a variety of topics including child/adult differences in learning, gesture as input to learners, the content of children’s books, disfluencies, and how children might learn the meaning of some highly abstract words. I am also interested in language emergence and change, and have studied how learners change languages and more recently, the nature and role of iconicity in sign language emergence.

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