The work in the Bergelson lab seeks to uncover how infants learn language from the world around them, i.e. how language develops, and in particular, how infants and toddlers learn words. We approach this by studying learners and their environments. Understanding the learner requires probing the early mental representations that allow infants to quickly turn perceptual information into linguistic representations of sound and meaning that they can decode, and eventually produce. The goal of this work is to build a theoretical account of how infants quickly gain full-fledged competence in learning the sounds and meanings of their language(s). Understanding the environment requires characterizing the information from which children learn. The goal of measuring and modeling aspects of children’s daily life is not to just describe it, but to test explanations of how everyday experiences shape language knowledge. Broadly put, our lab studies the mechanisms of early language learning by measuring babies’ early knowledge, capacities, and experiences, and testing links between them.