Professor Virginia Valian, School Visiting Professorial Fellow (November 2008 to May 2009)
Virginia Valian is Professor of Psychology at Hunter College , New York, USA. Professor Valian has been awared the School Visiting Professorial Fellowship at the School of Advanced Study for six months, from November 2008 until May 2009.
Professor Valian is a distinguished and creative cognitive scientist whose work in language acquisition addresses the origins of children's early knowledge of syntax. The work is genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, cognitive psychology, philosophy, cognitive development, psycholinguistics, first and second language acquisition.
Professor Valian has an international reputation for her groundbreaking work on the acquisition of language and for her work on the advancement of women in academic and related professions. Her book on women's employment, Why So Slow , is a monumental work which had a dramatic impact on academic from the day it appeared and showed how findings from academic research in the social sciences could be applied to change the world. It led to media attention, nationally and internationally, delivering talks and lecture and eventually to the establishment of a series of practical workshops.
Professor Valian's publication list
Her work which during her tenure will focus on the writing of a monograph on nativism and the acquisition of syntax, consists of cross-linguistic studies of syntactic structure, focusing in particular functional and lexical categories and comparing crucial cases where these differ across languages. Professor Valian argues that the results shed light on what is innate in language acquisition, and what can be innate and how innateness can be identified.
