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Our research

Language is one of the most intricate systems of knowledge that humans possess. Every normal human has at least one language, their native language, and they acquire it early in life, with remarkable ease and without formal instruction.  At the Child Language Development Lab, we’re interested in how children accomplish this feat, and what it can tell us about the workings of the human mind. We investigate these questions through behavioral experiments that track how language emerges and grows during infancy and early childhood. Through this work, we aim to deepen our understanding of one of the defining features of our species.

Recent publications

Brody, G., Feiman, R., & Aravind, A. (2025). Why do children think words are mutually exclusive?. Psychological Science.

Syrett, K., & Aravind, A. (2022). Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults.  Journal of Child Language.

Aravind, A., de Villiers, J., Pace, A., Valentine, H., Golinkoff, R., Hirsch-Pasek, K., Iglesias, A., & Wilson, M. (2018). Fast mapping word meanings across trials: young children forget all but their first guess.  Cognition.

Staniszewski, F., Stacey, R., & Aravind, A. (2023). “Overly Strong Interpretations of Modal Verbs In Child Language”. Proceedings of BUCLD 47.

Torma, C., Brody, G. & Aravind, A. (2021). “More than the sum of its parts: Acquiring semantically complex quantifiers”. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Rasin, R., & Aravind, A. (2020). The Nature of the Semantic Stimulus: The Acquisition of Every as a Case Study.  Natural Language Semantics.

Aravind, A., Hackl, M. & Fox, D. (2023). Principles of presupposition in development. Linguistics and Philosophy.

Chen, S., Torma, C. & Aravind, A. (2022). “Non-uniformities in the Development of Presupposition Projection in If-Conditionals.” Proceedings of BUCLD 46.

Aravind, A. & Koring, L. (2023). Experiencer troubles: A reappraisal of the predicate-based asymmetry in child passives. Language Acquisition.

New, K., Patel, P. & Aravind, A. (2023). How toddlers answer multiple wh-questions. Proceedings of BUCLD 48.