Research conducted at LLAS falls within the field of formal linguistics. Studies are carried out on a wide variety of phonological, syntactic, and semantic phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese.

Prof. Elaine and her students investigate children's behavior regarding syntactic and semantic aspects of Portuguese, such as WH-questions, relative clauses, absolute structures, coreference relations, and binding between an antecedent and a pronoun. They also examine how children interpret bare nouns and whether they are capable of computing conversational implicatures, among other topics.

Prof. Raquel and her students investigate the acquisition of phonological phenomena such as stress, rhythm, and optional phonological rules and processes in BP (such as external sandhi, palatalization, vowel harmony, vowel neutralization, and voicing) — as well as the relationship between these phenomena and their prosodic domains in child speech.

Generally, participants in these studies are typically developing monolingual children. Research involving other populations (such as DLD, adults acquiring a foreign language) has also been conducted in some studies. Visit the Dissertations and Theses page to check the results of this research.

The laboratory's research line is:

Studies of Language Acquisition Processes.