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The Developing Speaker

In order to produce words, a young language learner needs to simultaneously acquire an adequate segmental representation, a (phonological) grammar, and the means to construct a motor program and execute it in real time. It is well-known that it takes time to accomplish this and that during this time children’s word productions often deviate from the adult target. In an NWO-funded collaborative project with Radboud University, PhD student Natasja Delbar, supervised by Claartje Levelt, aims to chart the developing language production system and the segmental representations that the system encodes, and to investigate the role of the monitoring process in toddlers, using experimental methods that test, invoke or require self-monitoring (PerPLex: Perception and Production of Lexical items). 

Lateralization of tonal processing

In a collaborative and comparative project with researchers from Waseda University (Japan) PhD student Tingting Zheng, supervised by Claartje Levelt and Yiya Chen, studies the processing of lexical tone in 4- and 10-month-old infants using fNIRS. The processing of pitch accent has been shown to lateralize to the right hemisphere in Japanese 10-month-olds. At LUCL we study whether this lateralization also takes place in Dutch infants, who are acquiring a language without lexical tone.

Acquisition of Verb-copying constructions in Mandarin

PhD student Fei Bai, supervised by Lisa Cheng and Claartje Levelt, studies the development of complex syntactic processing, focusing on different types of verb-copying constructions in Mandarin Chinese, which involve different levels of syntactic processing. Both the comprehension and the active generation of these structures are investigated in children aged between 3;0 - 4;0 and 7;0 - 8;0 years old.

Theory of Mind