Dr.
Suzanne Flynn has been a Professor of Linguistics and Language Acquisition
at MIT since 1981, and she is a member of the LEX America Board of Directors.
She received her MS from the University of Puerto Rico and her MA and
Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her research focuses on the acquisition
of various aspects of syntax by both children and adults in bilingual,
second and third language acquisition contexts. This research is linked
to current cognitive and linguistic theories. More recently, her work
has focused on the neural representation of the multilingual brain.
She has also begun focusing on the nature of language in individuals
with early onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr.
Barbara Zurer Pearson has been at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst since 1998 as a Research Associate in the Communication Disorders
and Linguistics departments. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics
from the University of Miami, a B.S. in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers
of Other Languages) from Florida International University, and a B.A.
from Middlebury College. Pearson spent 20 years at the University of
Miami teaching TESOL, linguistics, and English composition in the Departments
of English and Psychology. During that time she co-founded the Bilingualism
Study Group (BSG) in collaboration with D. Kimbrough Oller to study
the development of language in children learning two languages. Funded
by NIH, the group completed two major projects: a longitudinal study
of 24 Spanish and English-learning babies from age 3 months to 3 years,
and a 5-year study of 1000 children in 10 elementary schools in Miami.
Pearson and her colleagues studied the effects of language of the home,
language of the school, and social context on bilingual children's progress
in learning to read in two languages. The framework that they developed
to assess vocabulary in two languages is still in use today. The results
of that project were published in the 2002 book Language and Literacy
in Bilingual Children. In 2008, Pearson was invited by Random House
to share her knowledge of bilingual development to help parents who
want to raise bilingual children. The resulting book, Raising a Bilingual
Child, is aimed at a general audience and makes a clear case for learning
two or more languages in childhood.
Dr.
Maria Polinsky is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and
the Director of the Language Processing Laboratory at Harvard University.
She is also a Research Professor at the Center for Research in Language
at the University of California at San Diego. Before joining Harvard,
she taught at the University of Southern California and the University
of California at San Diego, where she was the chair of the Department
of Linguistics and later Director of the Center for Research in Language.
She is a theoretical linguist with special interests in syntactic theory
and language change in minority (heritage) languages. In her current
work, she focuses on experimental approaches to testing linguistic theory.
She is currently an Associate Editor of Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory and has served or currently serves on the editorial boards of
seven additional journals, including Language and Heritage Language
Journal. She has served on the Expert Panel on Linguistics at the National
Science Foundation and taught courses at the Linguistic Society of America
Summer Institute (MIT 2005, Stanford, 2007 and Berkeley, 2009). In 2010,
she became the new at-large member of the Executive Committee of LSA.
She has done fieldwork or consulting work on a large number of languages
including Slavic, Caucasian, and Austronesian languages, as well as
Korean, Romanian, and Vietnamese. The author of over one hundred peer-reviewed
journal articles, two books, and editor of four other books, she is
particularly interested in Austronesian languages and has been working
on experimental testing of lesser-studied languages. Her research on
heritage languages has thus far included Russian, Korean, Spanish, Chinese,
and Tongan. She is the Director of the Fourth Heritage Language Summer
Institute featuring the theme Heritage Speakers: Linguistics and Pedagogy
at the University of Hawaii in June 2010. The Heritage Language Research
Institutes will address a pressing need for empirical data on the grammar
of heritage language learners, using methodologies developed by Polinsky,
designed to be replicable across languages.
Dr.
María Luisa Parra has a B.A. in Psychology, a Ph.D in Linguistics
and thirteen years of experience in the fields of Second Language Acquisition
and Child Bilingual Development. She has taught Spanish Language and
Culture at Boston University and in the Department of Romance Languages
and Literatures at Harvard. She also has broad experience working closely
with immigrant families and children. She was coordinator of the Home-School
Connection Program at the Elliot-Pearson Department of Child Development
at Tufts University where she looked at the various ways in which parents
and teachers supported transitions, school adaptation and academic success.
Based on an ecological theoretical model, Dr. Parra's work focuses on
how parents and teachers impact bilingual development through daily
interactions. A Spanish native from Mexico City, and a mother of two
bilingual and bicultural boys, Dr. Parra has always been fascinated
by the complexities and joys of bilingual development, and enjoys speaking
to parents, teachers and pediatricians in training who seek to understand
and enhance the road to multilingualism.
Dr.
Catherine Snow is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education
in the Human Development and Psychology Department at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from McGill
and worked for several years in the linguistics department of the University
of Amsterdam. Her research has encompassed studies of language development,
literacy development, social and familial influences on literacy development,
acquisition of English and bilingualism in language minority children,
and literacy acquisition in a second language. She is currently working
on issues of adolescent literacy, and on the prerequisites for improving
literacy instruction in middle and secondary schools. She chaired the
committees that produced Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children
(1998), Reading for Understanding: Towards an R&D agenda (2002), and
Knowledge to support the teaching of reading (2005). For more information:
http://gseweb.harvard.edu/~snow/
Dr.
Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He received his Phd in linguistics in 1955 from the University of Pennsylvania.
During the years 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard
University Society of Fellows. The major theoretical viewpoints of his
doctoral dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure,
1957. This formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure
of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and published
in 1975. Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor. In 1976
he was appointed Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics
and Philosophy. Chomsky has lectured at many universities here and abroad,
and is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards. He has
written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual
history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U.S. foreign
policy. Among his recent books are, New Horizons in the Study of
Language and Mind, On Nature and Language, and Hopes and Prospects.
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