My research investigates how people learn to use language to convey information about perceived events

My research investigates how people learn to use language to convey information about perceived events. This research investigates language learning in both children and adults, with the goal of understanding how children and adults differ in their language learning competencies and language learning strategies. A better understanding of these differences could allow for the creation of better techniques for training adults to use a second language. As part of this general goal of understanding how people learn to represent events in language, my research also examines the nature of event representations in nonlinguistic cognition. A better understanding of the mapping between event representations in language and in nonlinguistic cognition could allow for a better understanding of why some aspects of language learning are relatively easy (because they can be directly mapped onto nonlinguistic cognitive representations) and why some aspects of language learning are very difficult (because no such direct mappings are possible).