Her research examines the relationships between language acquisition or processing and cognition or social cognition in adults and children. She is also interested in vocabulary and how it relates to literacy development. She uses language as a window to examine basic cognitive processes, particularly how language processing in young children is similar to or different from that of adults. Her recent work focuses on the role of the linguistic input in language learning. Corrigan has published the results of her research in numerous journals and is co-editor of four books.