Caregiver input impacts children’s language development. Yet, learning often goes beyond what’s in the environment. Teasing apart this tension has profound implications for how society addresses variable language outcomes. As educators, how do we close opportunity gaps? As clinicians, can we predict effective interventions? At the Language and Cognition Laboratory, we take on these challenges through the eyes of learners, and explore the idea that year-to-year development involves an evolving capacity to extract information on a moment-to-moment basis. Our research is funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1844194 and BCS-2030160). We also recently launched KidTalk: Language Scrapbooking for Science. For more information, please follow the menu links.