I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. I am interested in the developmental trajectory of first language acquisition: how do children at each stage of development leverage their linguistic knowledge in order to represent and learn from the data available to them? I study some of the earliest stages of syntax and semantics acquisition in infancy, combining methods from computational cognitive modeling and developmental psycholinguistics. I conduct this research as part of the UCLA Language Acquisition Lab, where I am a Principle Investigator with Megha Sundara.
Before joining the faculty at UCLA, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, working with Anne Christophe. I earned my PhD in Linguistics in 2019 from the University of Maryland, working with Jeffrey Lidz.
Contact
perkinsl [at] ucla.edu
Department of Linguistics, UCLA, 3125 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095