What we do

All of us carry around in our heads knowledge of at least one language. Over the past several decades, linguists at MIT and around the world have discovered that this knowledge is much more intricately structured than had been previously imagined. Astonishingly, children can master most of their first language within the first few years of their lives. At the Language Acquisition Lab, we are interested in discovering more about how children accomplish such a complicated task with such ease and no formal instruction. Much of our work involves describing how children’s competence with their native language changes over the course of infancy and early childhood, eventually reaching an adult state.