About Us

We help little children say big sentences so they can communicate big ideas.

The T.E.L.L. Lab studies how and when children acquire the use of language, with a particular emphasis on learning grammar and syntax.  We hope that  our research will lead to improved speech and language interventions.

We believe that intervention is fundamentally about altering the input to children to improve their learning.  With this in mind, we assume that the answers to many of our questions about Treatment Efficacy can also be found by better understanding Language Learning. Our lab asks questions that combine basic learning principles with applied science.

We ask questions like:

• Is it better to hear many examples all at once or the same number of examples spaced farther apart in time?
• Does the choice of words used to teach a grammatical form matter — that is will you be better at learning past tense using words like drop and fall or using words like think and remember?
• How does what you hear in a therapy room and what you hear in everyday life influence how fast you can learn a new grammatical form?