Professor Lisa Pearl and graduate student Alandi Bates have a new paper coming out in the Journal of Child Language. In this paper, Pearl and Bates use the quantitative technique of computational cognitive modeling to investigate language variation across socio-economic status in English, and how this variation might affect language development. Their findings suggest that children across socio-economic status have access to input of similar quality when learning certain types of complex linguistic patterns involving "wh-words" like "who" and "what".