Elizabeth Simmons

My research, broadly defined, evaluates how very young children learn and comprehend spoken words. I utilize psycholinguistic methods such as the visual world paradigm and eye-tracking to better understand how infants and toddlers process the acoustic-phonetic detail in the speech signal. My work translates basic science procedures to clinical populations, including toddlers with language delay, in order to develop more sensitive metrics for diagnosing and treating childhood language impairments.