Karen Jesney’s research focuses on how the sounds of language are represented in the human mind (phonology), and especially how sound patterns are learned by children.  She uses a wide range of methodologies in her work, including speech perception and elicitation experiments, statistical analysis of longitudinal child data, traditional phonological analysis, and computer simulation. Her current research projects look at the acquisition of French liaison and other lexically-variable patterns, and at different means of measuring acquisition within corpus data.