Welcome to the web page of our Language and Cognition Lab.

Our lab focuses on the nature of human knowledge of space and language, their acquisition and development in children, and their breakdown under genetic impairment. Below is a description of some of our work, but please use the links to the left to find out more about our research including our Williams syndrome project.

What do we do in our lab, and what age ranges do we study?
In our lab, we work with children ages 18 months to 10 years old on tasks that engage their visual-spatial knowledge, and their knowledge of language. We have many different experiments that tap children's knowledge at different age levels. So if you are interested in participating, please check out our current projects to find out more. Even if you think that your child is a bit too young-- or a bit too old-- for our studies, please feel free to contact us and we will call you when we have an experiment that fits your child's age range.

What happens when you get to our lab?
We ask parents and children to come and visit us for about an hour per visit-- always at your convenience. We are very flexible about the time of your visit, though we do usually schedule between 9am-6pm Monday through Friday. We have dedicated parking spots on the Homewood campus for our families (see Directions to our Lab). Once you arrive at our parking, we ask you to ring a bell and we come to bring you to our lab. We have juice boxes and pretzels for the kids as we spend time going over our consent forms with parents. Once we are done with informed consent, the experimenter and the child carry out a simple task or tasks, either on the computer or using paper and pen. These tasks vary in length and we are careful to tailor the length of the study to the age of the child. All of our tasks are designed to be fun. Some are easy and others are more difficult. After the task, the child can pick a toy or $10 for helping with our research. Both of our two main testing rooms have areas for parents to watch their children without their child being distracted.

Please see the pages to the left for more information about our lab. If you have any questions feel free to contact Whitney Street (street@cogsci.jhu.edu or 410-516-6843).