Taking an approach informed by current linguistic theories and related areas of psychology and cognitive science. The Language Acquisition Lab studies first language acquisition, second language acquisition, and multilingual acquisition in the Chinese context, through naturalistic observations and experimental techniques. It addresses issues such as the initial state of language acquisition, language acquisition mechanisms, the role of linguistic input and the relation between linguistic development and cognitive development. Recent areas of interest include Mandarin-speaking children’s syntactic/semantic development, including acquisition of temporal reference, aspect markers, control, recursion and unaccusative structures.