About

Professor Laurel Perkins is affiliated with the Language Acquisition Lab in the Linguistics Department at UCLA. Her research focuses on understanding how infants tune into their native language or languages and how children develop the implicit rules of language that enable them to comprehend and produce grammatical sentences. The lab studies language perception and production abilities in infants, toddlers, and young children to explore these developmental processes.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Mathematics
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• Dataset: Representations of non-local syntactic dependencies feed verb learning in infancy

  Open MIND · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Anonymized dataset for Perkins, Ying, Williams & Lidz, "Representations of non-local syntactic dependencies feed verb learning in infancy," Developmental Science

  PublisherDOI

• Representations of Nonlocal Syntactic Dependencies Feed Verb Learning in Infancy

  Developmental Science · 2026-05-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The ability to represent both local and nonlocal syntactic dependencies emerges in an infant's second year of life, raising questions about how these early syntactic representations interact with language learning in other domains. Using wh-questions as our case study, we investigate how infants' syntactic dependency acquisition interacts with their early lexical development. Prior work finds that 18-month-olds represent fronted wh-phrases as nonlocal arguments in object wh-questions with known verbs. Here, we show that 19-21-month-olds (range: 18;29-21;26) do the same when interpreting unknown verbs. We introduce a novel Violation of Fit method, a cross-modal extension of the Violation of Expectations paradigm. Infants saw dialogues with novel verbs in object wh-questions (e.g., What is the girl gonna gorp?), transitive polar questions (Is the girl gonna gorp the toy?), or intransitive polar questions (Is the girl gonna gorp?). At test, infants viewed a causal event (e.g., a girl knocks over a tower), and we measured their attention as an indication of whether they considered the verbs to be a good fit for this type of event. Across the age range, we found that infants who heard wh-question dialogues attended similarly to the test events as infants who heard canonical transitive dialogues, and unlike infants who heard intransitive dialogues. Thus, 19-21-month-olds treat object wh-questions with a novel verb as transitive when relating them to scenes. This suggests that immediately after wh-dependency representations are first acquired, they are available to feed verb learning. SUMMARY: We find that 19-21-month-olds represent wh-phrases (e.g., what) as nonlocal objects in wh-questions with unknown verbs (e.g., What is the girl gonna gorp?). We introduce a novel experimental paradigm, Violation of Fit, which measures how well an infant considers a particular sentence to fit with a particular scene. This test reveals that infants treat object wh-questions with a novel verb as transitive, and therefore a good fit to a causal event. This suggests that immediately after wh-dependency representations are first acquired, they are available to feed verb learning.

  PublisherDOI

• Mind the gap: Learning the surface forms of movement dependencies

  Language · 2026-04-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In acquiring a syntax, children must detect evidence for abstract structural dependencies that can be realized in variable ways in the surface forms of sentences. In What did David fix? , learners must identify a nonlocal relation between a fronted object of the verb ( what ) and the phonologically null ‘gap’ in canonical direct object position after the verb, where it is thematically interpreted. How do learners identify a nonadjacent dependency between an expression and something that has no overt phonological form? We propose that identifying abstract syntactic dependencies requires statistical inference over both overt linguistic material and unsatisfied grammatical expectations: noticing when a predicted argument for a verb is unexpectedly missing may serve as evidence for the gap of an argument movement dependency. We provide computational support for this hypothesis. We develop a learner that uses predicted but unexpectedly missing objects of verbs to identify possible gaps of object movement, and identifies which surface morphosyntactic properties of sentences are correlated with these possible movement gaps. We find that it is in principle possible for a learner using this mechanism to identify the majority of sentences with object movement in child-directed English, and that prior knowledge of which verbs require objects provides an important guide for identifying which surface distributions characterize object movement. This provides a computational account for why verb argument-structure knowledge developmentally precedes the acquisition of movement in a language like English. More broadly, these findings illustrate how statistical learning and learning from violated expectations can be combined to novel effect in the domain of language acquisition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Modeling regularization in language acquisition as noise-tolerant grammar selection

  Cognition · 2025-11-13 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Thematic Content, Not Number Matching, Drives Syntactic Bootstrapping

  Language Learning and Development · 2024-07-19 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Future of Experimental Syntax

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-09-18

  book-chapter

  Abstract In this concluding chapter of the handbook, each contributor has written a 500 word mini-essay presenting their view of the future of experimental syntax, from the important theoretical questions on the horizon, to the methodological challenges that experimental syntacticians need to solve to answer those questions. The hope is that this final chapter will serve both as concrete inspiration for future studies in experimental syntax and as a benchmark for measuring the success of the field in the years to come.

  PublisherDOI

• Behavioral Acquisition Methods With Infants

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-09-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter reviews key findings in the domain of infant syntax, covering both the methods used to explore infant syntax and the discoveries linguists have made concerning the growth of syntactic knowledge. We first explore children’s initial steps in acquiring the syntactic categories of their language, how children use distributional evidence to build these categories and how these distributional properties are used in making syntactic and semantic inferences. Second, we examine children’s early phrase structure representations, focusing on hierarchical structure, the canonical order of subjects, verbs and objects, and the emergence of language-specific properties of clauses, such as the licensing of null subjects. Finally, we turn to infants’ acquisition of grammatical dependencies, exploring when and how infants detect dependencies that hold across non-adjacent morphemes in particular syntactic environments, dependencies that involve movement and dependencies that involve binding. This review provides a clear summary of both the prospects and challenges for examining syntax in infancy. While infant research must face the challenge that infants are limited in their behavioral repertoire, at the same time, studying infant syntax represents the frontier of our knowledge about the emergence of grammar. Gaining a richer understanding of infants’ sensitivities and their ability to make inferences from distributional observations to syntactic representations may ultimately help us to better understand how the language faculty allows us to acquire whatever language we are exposed to.

  PublisherDOI

• Learning unaccusativity: Evidence for split intransitivity in child Spanish

  Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2023 · 1 citations

  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Cognitive psychology

  We examine four features of unaccusativity in child-directed and child Spanish to determine what cues children might use to distinguish unaccusative and unergative verbs. Two are cross-linguistic lexico-semantic features: Subjects of unaccusatives are patients so we expect more inanimate subjects with unaccusatives; and unaccusatives tend to have an endpoint, hence may occur more frequently with perfective aspect. The other two are language-specific morphosyntactic features: VS order is grammatical with unaccusatives but not unergatives, and many unaccusative verbs allow/require the anticausative se clitic. We find all four features robustly in children's input and that even 1-2-year-olds show discriminate use of them.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Power of Ignoring: Filtering Input for Argument Structure Acquisition

  Cognitive Science · 2022 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Natural Language Processing

  Learning in any domain depends on how the data for learning are represented. In the domain of language acquisition, children's representations of the speech they hear determine what generalizations they can draw about their target grammar. But these input representations change over development as a function of children's developing linguistic knowledge, and may be incomplete or inaccurate when children lack the knowledge to parse their input veridically. How does learning succeed in the face of potentially misleading data? We address this issue using the case study of "non-basic" clauses in verb learning. A young infant hearing What did Amy fix? might not recognize that what stands in for the direct object of fix, and might think that fix is occurring without a direct object. We follow a previous proposal that children might filter nonbasic clauses out of the data for learning verb argument structure, but offer a new approach. Instead of assuming that children identify the data to filter in advance, we demonstrate computationally that it is possible for learners to infer a filter on their input without knowing which clauses are nonbasic. We instantiate a learner that considers the possibility that it misparses some of the sentences it hears, and learns to filter out those parsing errors in order to correctly infer transitivity for the majority of 50 frequent verbs in child-directed speech. Our learner offers a novel solution to the problem of learning from immature input representations: Learners may be able to avoid drawing faulty inferences from misleading data by identifying a filter on their input, without knowing in advance what needs to be filtered.

  PublisherDOI

• Dataset: "Eighteen-month-old infants represent nonlocal syntactic dependencies"

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Anonymized dataset for Perkins & Lidz, "Eighteen-month-old infants represent nonlocal syntactic dependencies," PNAS

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jeffrey Lidz

  University of Maryland, College Park

  9 shared

• Naomi H. Feldman

  2 shared

• Dave Kush

  1 shared

• Katy Carlson

  Morehead State University

  1 shared

• William Matchin

  University of South Carolina

  1 shared

• Matthew Wagers

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  1 shared

• Tyler Knowlton

  University of Pennsylvania

  1 shared

• Jennifer Culbertson

  1 shared