The Hunter College Language Acquisition Research Center has the goal of unraveling the mystery of the uniquely human gift of language. The center is directed by Dr. Virginia Valian of the Department of Psychology. Dr. Valian, her colleague Dr Martin Chodorow, and her research team of students and research assistants examine the important data that children can provide.
Current research in the Language Acquisition Research Center (LARC) investigates knowledge and use of language in young monolingual English speakers (two- and three-year-olds) and bilingual adults. We currently are performing a syntactic priming experiment with Determiners, conducting a suite of corpus analyses of children’s earliest multi-word speech. and studying bilinguals’ cognitive processes.