Developmental Psycholinguistics Laboratory (DPL)

Overview

• We are interested in young children’s first language acquisition and language processing. In particular, our lab investigates how children acquire and use the knowledge of meaning.
• We assess children’s semantic knowledge and processing by utilizing behavioral tasks, including various linguistic comprehension tasks and cognitive tasks.
• We also adopt the visual-world eye tracking paradigm, with an eye-tracking system designed specifically for children’s participation.
• We actively collaborate with members of the Second Language Acquisition Lab and the Neurolinguistics and Language Processing Lab. We have a weekly joint project development seminar, LING851: Research in Acquisition and Processing (RAP), in which graduate students of the three labs informally discuss research progress and exchange research interests with each other.

More about our research     

Research opportunities for children and families

Recent Lab Events

• A recent graduate Münir Özturhan and Utako Minai had a co-authored article accepted for publication in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. (September, 2026)
• Münir Özturhan has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled "Temporal dynamics of argument-verb computations in Turkish sentence processing: Evidence from Event-related potentials", co-advised by Dr. Alison Gabriele and Dr. Robert Fiorentino. He will start his new appointment as a post-doc researcher at the Czech Science Academy. (July, 2026)
• Xuan Wang has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled "Examining the Role of Individual Differences and Syntactic Constraints in the Processing of Reflexives in L1 and L2 English: An ERP Investigation", co-advised by Dr. Alison Gabriele and Dr. Robert Fiorentino. Starting in August, he will be a post-doc researcher at the North Western University. (July, 2026)
• A former lab member Ayumi Nobuki and Utako Minai presented a poster titled "Development of pragmatic meaning comprehension: Insights from Japanese-speaking children's comprehension of an implied meaning arising from a particle" at the 4th Experiments in Linguistics Meaning Conference. (June, 2026)
• Allison Monteleone graduated KU School of Social Welfare and will start the Master's program in Social Welfare in Fall 2026, with the Self Memorial Scholarship, which recognizes outstanding seniors at KU who transitions into their first year of a graduate degree program at KU (May, 2026). 
• Lab members participated in the Language Exploration at the Library at the Lawrence Public Library, an outreach event organized by Dr. Lacey Wade, the Director of Sociolinguistics Lab. (April, 2026)
• Natalia Lopez-Rios has delivered a talk titled "How do monolingual & bilingual children comprehend sentences with a universal quantifier?" at the 2025 MKN Heartland McNair Research Conference. (September, 2025)
• Ayumi Nobuki has successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled "Comprehension of an implied meaning in children: Investigating a role of contrastive particle in the felicity judgment of sentences". Starting in Fall 2025, Ayumi will be appointed as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College. (July, 2025)
• Natalia Lopez-Rios is an awardee of the 2025 Outstanding Junior Awards in Linguistics, which recognizes the academic excellence among Linguistics students in their junior level. She has also received an Undergraduate Research Award (UGRA) for the Summer 2025 offered by KU Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowship. The fund will support her project on quantifier comprehension by monolingual and bilingual children. (May, 2025)
• Ayumi Nobuki and Utako Minai co-presented a poster titled "Comprehension of implied meaning in Japanese-speaking pre-school children: Investigation of the role of contrastive -wa" at the 2025 SRCD Biennial Meeting. (May, 2025)
• Utako Minai, Ayumi Nobuki, Münir Özturhan, Xuan Wang, Linday Williams and Allison Monteleone co-presented a poster titled "Probing discourse cues facilitating children’s quantifier comprehension: the effectiveness of the Question Under Discussion disambiguation" at the 2025 SRCD Biennial Meeting. (May, 2025)
• Allison Monteleone has been selected to deliver one of the three Accessible, Creative & Engaging (ACE) talks at the Spring 2025 Undergraduate Research Symposium on Friday, April 25th. (April, 2025).
• Ayumi Nobuki and Utako Minai co-presented a talk titled "Comprehension of implied meaning in Japanese-speaking children: a case study examining sentences with contrastive -wa" at the 5th International Conference on Theoretical East Asian Psycholinguistics. (April, 2025)
• Utako Minai's co-authored article, titled "Comprehension and processing of the universal quantifier in children, adolescents and adults", has been published in Journal of Child Language. (January, 2025)