People use language every day for all kinds of different tasks. And when we do, most of our attention is on what we’re trying to communicate, not on the structure sentences we’re using. Even so, we produce sentences according to consistent rules and understand them quickly and flexibly. This requires a massive amount of knowledge about how our languages work! How do children build up that store of knowledge in just a few short years?

At PALM, we explore children’s learning, representation and processing of language to better understand how children accomplish this.