Staff Profile

I am a Lecturer in Child Language Acquisition (starting September 2020). I got my Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Connecticut in August 2021. Before joining the academic staff at Newcastle University, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine.

My research is marked by an interdisciplinary approach of combining fine-grained corpora analysis, behavioral methodologies, and computational modeling in order to investigate important learning problems in child language acquisition. Up until this point, I have mainly studied English-learning children's acquisition of the verbal passive. In particular, my research aim is to contribute to a better understanding of language development by investigating what children do and do not learn from their input given their prior knowledge and abilities.

Semester 1

SEL1008 The Nature of Language (co-taught with Dr Rebecca Woods)

SEL2235 CHiLD: Current Hypotheses in Language Development

Semester 2

SEL3438 From Input to Output: The Blackbox of Child Language Acquisition (co-taught with Dr Rebecca Woods)

SEL8695 Learning and Learnability (co-taught with Dr Rebecca Woods)

• Article

  • Nguyen E, Pearl L. The link between lexical semantic features and children's comprehension of English verbal be-passives. Language Acquisition 2021, 28(4), 433-450.