Welcome to the Infant & Child Learning Lab at UMBC!

Learning one’s native language is a phenomenal achievement. At such a young age, how do children master a system that is so complicated and sophisticated long before they can tie their shoelaces or ride a bicycle? The ICL Lab explores early cognitive and language development with a focus on bilingualism and cross-cultural variation in early learning. We work with infants and children from birth, to early childhood in laboratory, community, and international contexts.

How do babies begin the process of language learning? What happens in the mind of an infant to enable the first words, phrases and sentences that babies begin to produce? How do children acquire two languages? What are the consequences of bilingualism for cognitive and language development? These are just some of the questions that drive our research.