Interests: First language acquisition, psycholinguistics, development of syntax. I am interested in how psycholinguistic methods can be used to gather more sensitive measures of children's linguistic representations and language processing. I am also interested in how individual differences in children and adults affect language processing and performance. Personal Home Page Language Development Lab Contact Details

Representative Publications:

• Messenger, K., Yuan, S., & Fisher, C. (in press). Learning verb syntax via listening: New evidence from 22-month-olds. Language Learning and Development. DOI:10.1080/15475441.2014.978331
• Messenger, K., Branigan, H.P., McLean, J.F. & Sorace, A. (2012). Is young children's passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language 66(4), 568–587.
• Messenger, K., Branigan, H.P. & McLean, J.F. (2012). Is children's acquisition of the passive a staged process? Evidence from six- and nine-year-olds' production. Journal of Child Language 39(5), 991-1016.
• Messenger, K., Branigan, H.P. & McLean, J.F. (2011). Evidence for (shared) abstract structure underlying children's short and full passives. Cognition 121(2), 268-274.

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