Image of children on a tree.

Welcome to ELfLanD

At the Edinburgh Laboratory for Language Development (ELfLand), we study how we learn to understand and speak language. ELfLanD is part of the Wee Science research consortium.

Participate

At ELfLanD we are looking for participants who can help with our research. There are different types of studies for different age groups ranging from 6 months to adults. If you are interested in participating in our studies or finding out what happens during your participation, please see our page for participants.

Study with us

We welcome student volunteers to help us with our research and students to carry out dissertation research with us. For more details please check out our page for students.

Our team

Portrait of Mits Ota

Mits Ota is a professor in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences. He is primarily interested in how we learn the sounds and words of the languages we are exposed to during childhood and adulthood.

Portrait of Barbora Skarabela

Barbora Skarabela is a linguist interested in child language development. Her research focuses on how children acquire grammar and learn to navigate discourse, using a combination of experimental and corpus-based methods.

Portrait of Annie Holtz

Annie Holtz is a postdoctoral researcher working for the ESRC-funded project “Language learning, communication and the emergence of phonotactic constraints”.

Former members

Nicola Davies-Jenkins: Research assistant, “The role of baby-talk words in early language development” (ESRC)

Judit Fazekas: Research assistant, “The role of baby-talk words in early language development” (ESRC)

Anaïs Tropé: Research assistant, “The role of baby-talk words in early language development” (ESRC)