The broad, theoretical question driving my research: how do variations in early social experience affect social cognitive development? I explore this question with three lines of research:
Infant social networks - what is the nature of infant social relationships? How does the structure of infant social relationships relate to their early social cognition?
Language experience and social attention - how does early language experience influence adult’s and children’s attention to communicative contexts? In a collaboration with Jenny Lu, we examine deaf and hearing adults and children’s attention and comprehension of co-speech gesture to understand in what ways early language experience affects social cognition.
Cross-cultural variations - how does the socio-cultural context influence children’s social cognition? In collaboration with Dr. Laura Shneidman, we explore 18-month-old US and Yucatec Mayan infants’ word learning and naturalistic action environment.