What we aim to understand
Our overarching goal is to characterise the mechanisms that support successful language development in bilingual children, and to identify why some children experience persistent difficulties. We combine experimental methods with detailed profiles of children’s language experience and cognitive resources.
1) Input
Quantify children’s language environments (amount, consistency, and quality of exposure across languages) and connect these measures to language growth.
2) Uptake
Identify how children extract patterns from the input—through learning, prediction, and adaptation—using controlled tasks that target grammar, vocabulary, and real-time processing.
3) Language disorder
Understand how DLD interacts with bilingual experience: which difficulties are shared with monolingual DLD, which are shaped by bilingual input, and which profiles predict longer-term outcomes.
How we study it
Language tasks
Standardised measures and targeted experiments on grammar, vocabulary, and narrative skills.
Eye-tracking
Visual-world paradigms to measure moment-by-moment interpretation and prediction.
Production tasks
Elicted production of sentence structures via picture/video descriptions.
Questionnaires
Detailed profiles of input, use, dominance shifts, and sociolinguistic context.
Individual differences
Memory, attention, inhibition, and learning measures to explain variability in outcomes.
Open science
Transparent workflows, preregistration where appropriate, and shareable materials.
Interested in participating?
We work with bilingual children (with and without DLD) and welcome collaboration with researchers, schools, and community partners.
Meet the team See our studies