Laurel Perkins

Laurel Perkins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. She investigates first language acquisition processes, focusing on infants' syntactic and semantic comprehension using computational and experimental methods. Her work emphasizes how children leverage prior linguistic knowledge to process noisy input during grammar development. Perkins holds a PhD from the University of Maryland (2019) and previously conducted postdoctoral research at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS Paris). She leads research in the UCLA Language Acquisition Lab.

Education

• PhD in Linguistics, University of Maryland, 2019 (Advisor: Jeffrey Lidz)
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, 2019–2022

Research Interests

• Noise-tolerant syntax learning mechanisms
• Non-local syntactic dependency acquisition in infancy
• Syntax-semantics bootstrapping in early verb learning
• Computational modeling of grammatical development

Her research synthesizes behavioral experiments with formal computational models to explain how children construct grammars from imperfect input data. Recent work explores how infants represent syntactic structures like filler-gap dependencies and how visual perception interacts with linguistic learning.

Awards & Grants None explicitly listed in provided texts.

Lab Affiliations

• UCLA Language Acquisition Lab