Song Zi Tao
宋子韜
PhD Candidate in Child Language Development
How do children learn verbs, and how do languages package events into words?
About
I am a PhD candidate in Child Language Development at the Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo, where I work with Prof. Haryu Etsuko.
I study how Mandarin-speaking children learn verbs, and how languages package action and result into words. Through comprehension and production experiments with children and adults, I ask how linguistic structure shapes early word learning — and where children face challenges along the way. I am also interested in second language acquisition, morphological bootstrapping, and understudied Asian languages.
Research Interests
Verb learning
How Mandarin-speaking children learn verbs for change-of-state events — action verbs, resultative verb compounds, and the rules behind them.
Verbal packaging
How languages package action and result into words, and how children discover these packaging patterns.
News
- Nov 2026Poster (upcoming) at the 51st Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 51), Boston.
- Spring 2026Started teaching Introduction to Academic Skills at Showa Pharmaceutical University.
- Aug 2025Presented a poster at the 22nd European Conference on Developmental Psychology (ECDP 2025) in Vilnius.
- Apr 2024Started my PhD at the University of Tokyo and was awarded the UTokyo SPRING-GX Fellowship.