Sandy LaTourrette

I study language, cognition, and their interaction across the lifespan: from infants as young as 6 months to preschool- and elementary-age children to adults. My research has investigated how labeling objects influences the way infants categorize and remember them, and how infants learn to map labels not just to referents but to particular word meanings. My research also examines what information infants, children and adults use to learn, and remember, word meanings. Across all of my work, I am interested in variability in language development, asking how language abilities vary across different learners (e.g., multilingual children, children who are late talkers) and different contexts (e.g., hearing speech that is less clear or that occurs in an unfamiliar accent).