One of the longstanding questions in the study of language is why humans are the only species on the planet capable of its acquisition. One of the main goals of the Comparative Communication Laboratory is the study of the mechanisms underlying language acquisition.   These include statistical learning mechanisms that have been implicated in the early acquisition of phonetic categories and word boundaries, rule learning, and generalization of learning. Our approach compares the performance of human infants and adults, as well as nonhuman primates (hereafter primates) on a variety of behavioral tasks in order to identify the underlying similarities and differences both between species and within humans across stages of development. In addition, we are interested in studying select topics pertaining to cognition and conspecific communication in primates. See the links below for more details.

Infant Lab

Adult Lab

Primate Lab