S.E.Carroll

Prof. emerita Susanne Carroll

PhD, M.A., Hons.B.A.
Pronouns: she/her

Contact information

Background

Educational Background

B.A. Linguistics, York University, 1975

Doctor of Philosophy Linguistics, Université de Montréal, 1981

M.A. Linguistics, Université de Montréal, 1978

Research

Areas of Research

Language acquisition

My research covers both first and second language acquisition, in children and adults. But adults are my favourite learners, especially in the early stages of exposure. 

Like all serious language acquisition researchers, my work begins with models and theories of human natural languages. My research career began with a doctoral thesis on French syntax, specifically left and right dislocations, constructions that are mediated by propositional semantics, Information Structure, and language-in-use factors (=def pragmatics). My acquisition research has investigated French gender assignment, grammatical number, classifiers, and the segmentation of sound-forms (which touches on intonation, stress and cliticization processes, and phonological templates). 

I have used a variety of research methods, including corpus analysis and experimentation. In particular, I have conducted many studies on adults exposed to a language for the first time in a laboratory setting. Most of this research has something to do with the topic "input to learning mechanisms", which connects to general theories of learning based on associative, distributional, and statistical learning --- and from there to core issues in psychology.

Publications

More Information

The list of publications focuses on (a) most recent, and (b) most important publications. For a complete list see my info. in Google Scholar.