Projects & Findings
Figure 1. Stimuli of an event: A girl (played by Luisa Seguin) broke the stick with a hammer.
Structural Dependencies
Resolving Questions
Infants: Interpreting questions with heuristics
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Preferential looking (ongoing): 15-month-olds comprehend instrument questions (what did she break the stick with _?) before representing dependencies between the filler (what) and the gap. They link the gap ("_") to an unmentioned event participant (hammer). [manuscript]
Figure 2. Proportion looking to instrument in Wh vs. Control condition across three time windows of interest (N=24)
Applying Dependencies
Toddlers: Verbs in object questions are transitive
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Violation of expectations: 20-month-olds treat an unknown verb (gorp) in an object question (What is the girl gonna gorp _?) as transitive when assessing their fit to events. (Perkins et al., 2026)
Figure 3. Toddlers' looking time for a causative event