Welcome
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 (CCL) 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 on a
variety of behavioral tasks in order to identify the underlying
similarities and differences across species and stages of development.
If you are interested in participating, please see the Infant Research and For Parents pages.
If you are interested in participating, please see the Infant Research and For Parents pages.
In addition, we also study select topics pertaining to cognition and conspecific communication in primates. Two recent areas of focus include a comparative approach to motor planning and the evolutionary roots of social cognition and action perception.