Haykaz’s research focuses on how young children learn new words from others in different social contexts. His dissertation work used the event-related potential (ERP) technique to track the acquisition of semantic representations in a cross-situational learning task. In his postdoctoral work with Dr. Janet F. Werker, he will investigate the neural mechanisms that support children’s responses to speaker social cues, in particular ones that highlight their pedagogical intentions, and how these may facilitate children’s novel word learning.