The process of acquiring a language involves a complex interplay of the child's own cognitive capabilities with their unique social and language environment. My research focuses on building a comprehensive model of the normal processes of early language acquisition, particularly early grammatical knowledge. My research foci revolve around three important domains of inquiry: 1) determining how infants' developing perceptual skills influence their burgeoning grammatical knowledge, 2) analyzing the nature of infants' processing and representation of grammatical dependencies (structural links between different parts of a sentence), and 3) understanding the role of the environment in determining language acquisition outcomes.