Language acquisition research at UMass investigates the inplications of linguistic theory for our understanding of child and adult language learning, and develops theories of language learning. Research in this area ranges from the logic of acquisition in learnability theory, to the development and study of corpora of child language in a number of languages, to experimentation on topics such as complex structures in syntax, quantification in semantics, implicatures in pragmatics, and the order of acquisition of phonological structure. The Language Acquisition Research Center facilitates contact with work in second language acquisition and Communication Disorders and enables experimental research in nursery and elementary schools.
Faculty
Michael Becker michael@linguist.umass.edu | ![]() | Research interests: Phonology, computational and experimental morphophonology, fieldwork, Semitic |
Lisa Green lgreen@linguist.umass.edu | ![]() | Research interests: Syntax/Semantics with focus on African American English, syntactic variation, L1 Acquisition |
Gaja Jarosz jarosz@linguist.umass.edu | ![]() | Research interests: Phonology, Learnability, Computational Modeling, Acquisition |
Magda Oiry moiry@linguist.umass.edu | ![]() | Research interests: Syntax, L1 and L2 Acquisition |
Joe Pater pater@linguist.umass.edu | ![]() | Research interests: Phonological Theory and Learning, Computational and Experimental Methods |
Tom Roeper roeper@linguist.umass.edu | ![]() | Research interests: L1 and L2 Acquisition, Multiple Grammar Theory, AAE, Syntax, Morphology |
Graduate students
Jaieun Kim jaieunkim@umass.edu | ![]() | Research interests: Language acquisition, syntax, Korean | Year started: 2015 |
Alex Nyman anyman@umass.edu | ![]() | Research interests: Phonetics and phonology, language acquisition, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics | Year started: 2018 |
Recent dissertations
Brandon Prickett. 2021. Learning phonology with sequence-to-sequence neural networks.
Michael Clauss. 2017. The Form and Acquisition of Free Relatives.
Presley Pizzo. 2015. Investigating Properties of Phonotactic Knowledge Through Web-Based Experimentation.
Robert Staubs. 2014. Computational Modeling of Learning Biases in Stress Typology.
Tanja Heizmann. 2012. Exhaustivity In Questions & Clefts; And The Quantifier Connection: A Study In German And English.
Karen Jesney. 2011. Cumulative Constraint Interaction In Phonological Acquisition And Typology.