My research focuses on first language acquisition, or how children learn to talk, language in use and bilingualism. I am especially interested in the acquisition of morphosyntax, or the structure of language (from grammatical bits of language like plural endings to the ways in which words are combined in sentences).

I am leading the MEDAL Twinning consortium (Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics, with the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Radboud University and the University of Birmingham). With Dagmar Divjak and Petar Milin at Birmingham, we are investigating subject expression through a cross-linguistic corpus study, and with Caroline Rowland at the MPI in Psycholinguistics, we are exploring the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar in Estonian (and cross-linguistic) CDI data. Others in the project are working on multimodal language usage with Aslı Özyürek, Radboud University. MEDAL’s aim is to enhance the training, networking and development of early-career researchers and others through summer schools, mobility, and various training and mentoring events (funded by the European Commission’s Twinning scheme, 2023-2025).

I am the PI of the project ‘Language in the digital age: spoken interaction and instant messaging’ (funded by the Estonian Research Council, 2024-2027), which joins the Spoken Language research group with the Teen Speak in Estonia (TeKE, 2019-2023) research group. The TeKE team collected and analysed a corpus of teenagers’ spoken language and social media chats (funded by the “Estonian Language and Culture in the Digital Age” programme of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research).

I’m also collaborating in an AHRC-funded project based at Sheffield, UK (Feast and Famine, 2020-2023), investigating morphological overabundance and defectivity in various languages. Two ongoing studies with Feast and Famine colleagues have looked at how children cope with overabundant morphology in Estonian and Croatian, and how linguistic prescriptivism may affect the presence of overabundance or defectivity in a language.

With Marika Padrik (PI), we have a grant from the Estonian Education and Youth Board for the development of a diagnostic instrument for assessing bilingual children’s language skills. We are supervising a team of students testing sentence repetition and pseudoword repetition tasks, designed to assess language processing in bilingual children.

I have ongoing collaboration with the cross-linguistic acquisition team within LuCiD (the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development at Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster), comparing Estonian with Finnish and Polish to see how the learning process is similar across languages and what is language-specific. This collaboration followed on a two-year Marie Curie Research Fellowship with Elena Lieven at the University of Manchester (2014-2016). 

In October 2017, I began collaborating on an ESRC-funded project based at the University of York (with Serge Sagna, Dunstan Brown and Marilyn Vihman), investigating the acquisition of nominal morphosyntax and agreement in Gújjolaay Eegimaa, an endangered Atlantic language spoken in southern Senegal.

I was a member of the COST Action IS1406 (“Enhancing children’s oral language skills across Europe and beyond: A collaboration focusing on interventions for children with difficulties learning their first language”), which ended in spring 2019.

Other interests

I have worked on a project with Diane Nelson (University of Leeds) on linguistic animacy, in which we organised a workshop (Animacy in Language and Cognition) in 2015, edited a Special Issue in Open Linguistics (2018/2019), and collaborated with Simon Kirby on an iterated learning experiment. 

My research has explored variation in Estonian morphosyntax: corpus studies on case-marking (with Mari Aigro and Liina Lindström) and verb-second tendencies (with George Walkden), as well as experimental approaches to online interpretation of case (with Elsi Kaiser and Merilin Miljan).

I previously participated in the compiling of a survey of the state of the Estonian language, commissioned by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research in preparation for the new Estonian Language Development Plan.

Recent publications (since 2010)

My ResearchGate profile

and my GoogleScholar profile

Full publication list is accessible here