Laura Wagner

I study how children acquire language, and in particular, how they learn about meaning. I'm interested in how children's early conceptual abilities map onto the semantics that underlie natural language. Within this general area, I specialize primarily in event semantics and cognition: How do children think about and talk about what's happening? My current research projects look at how pre-schoolers acquire and use the dimension of verb meaning called telicity (whether or not the verb describes an event's end-point), how toddlers learn the meanings of verb morphology (such as the progressive -ing and the past tense -ed), and how pre-linguistic infants analyze events.