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Sun Min
Director of Media Relations
Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations
Ann Senghas
Associate Professor of Psychology
Director, Language Acquisition and Development Laboratory
Ann Senghas, Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Language Acquisition and Development Laboratory, joined the Barnard faculty in 1999. Her teaching includes courses in developmental psychology and language acquisition.
Before coming to Barnard, Professor Senghas held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Sign Language Research Center, the University of Rochester, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.
Professor Senghas' current research examines the emergence of grammatical structure in a new sign language being created by a generation of deaf children and adolescents in Nicaragua. Each summer, Professor Senghas and her research group spend six weeks in Nicaragua, videotaping the signing of deaf children and adults, in order to document and analyze their continually changing language.
Professor Senghas studies the ways in which language learners and language users create ordered systems from disordered input and how this ability develops over the lifespan.
Professor Senghas' research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health. She has received a Frontiers of Science Fellow Award from the National Academies of Science and Engineering.
Professor Senghas serves on the editorial board for the Annual Review of Language Acquisition.
Selected Publications
“Referential shift in Nicaraguan Sign Language: A comparison with American Sign Language,” with J. E. Pyers, Visible variation: Comparative studies on sign language structure, P. Perniss, R. Pfau and M. Steinbach eds. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, in press).
“Language emergence: Clues from a new Bedouin sign language,” Current Biology Vol. 15, No.12 (2005): 463-465.
“Children creating core properties of language: evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua,” with S. Kita, and A. Özyürek, ScienceVol. 305: 5691 (2004): 1779-1782.
“Intergenerational influence and ontogenetic development in the emergence of spatial grammar in Nicaraguan Sign Language,” Cognitive DevelopmentVol. 18 (2003): 511-531.
“Agreement morphology and the acquisition of noun-drop in Spanish,”with W. Snyder and K. Inman, Language AcquisitionVol. 9, No. 2 (2003): 157-173.
“The acquisition of language by children,” with J. R. Saffran and J. C. Trueswell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98: 23 (2001): 12874-12875.
“Children creating language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language acquired a spatial grammar,” with M. Coppola, Psychological Science Vol. 12, No. 4 (2001): 323-328.212.854.5480
asenghas@barnard.edu
EDUCATION:
BA, Smith College
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyRELATED LINKS:
Full CV (pdf)
SPECIALIZATIONS:
Language acquisition
Cognitive development
Language evolution
Historical linguistics
Gesture