Most humans naturally acquire, understand, and use language from birth. Because of this apparent naturalness, the complexity of language phenomena is often overlooked. The lab focuses on revealing this underlying complexity by investigating the cognitive and neural processes that support language.

Understanding and using language requires distinguishing linguistic information from signals that are constantly present in the natural environment. This involves the extraction of linguistic elements through discrimination, the integration of these elements into higher-level representations, and the inhibition of competing elements. These processes occur in real time and constitute a highly complex and demanding cognitive operation.