The Linguistics Program has been very active in multidisciplinary research on language acquisition. Our empirical research is informed by learnability theory and computational modeling, psycholinguistics, and cognitive psychology. Faculty and students study how young children learn their native language (L1 acquisition) and conduct cross-linguistic investigations on the acquisition of syntax (e.g., syntactic categories, word order, tense and aspect, null subjects, and wh-questions) and the development of meaning in the lexicon. Dissertations in L1 include a study on English proficiency in bilingual French/English schoolchildren (Quirk 2019); a computational modeling study on how children learn prepositions (Stewart 2015) and a study on the acquisition of questions in English (Pozzan 2011 and Bulgarian (Tornyova 2011).  We report our research at conferences around the world and encourage students to develop research and presentation skills early in their career.

The multilingual environment of New York City, the varied language backgrounds of our students, and the collaborations among faculty and students, make second language acquisition (L2 acquisition) and bilingualism a particularly rich field of study at The Graduate Center. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, we study language learning in adulthood, simultaneous and sequential bilingualism, and language development in first and second-generation bilinguals. Both behavioural and psychophysiological methods are used, such as elicited imitation, elicited production, comprehension, grammaticality judgment, Event Related Potential (ERP), eye-tracking and pupillometry. Recent dissertations include studies of Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers (Chard 2018); pragmatic strategies in L2 Japanese by L1 Hebrew speakers (Barkan 2018); heritage speaker language processing (Madsen 2018) and cross-linguistic structural priming in heritage Spanish speakers and late bilinguals.