Language Development

Patricia Brooks is a Professor at the College of Staten Island. She conducts research in the areas of language development in children, second language learning in adults, and speech production and comprehension. On-going research projects explore (1) speech perception in children with Autism, (2) lexical access in children with Specific Language Impairment, (3) individual differences in adult second language learning, and (4) comprehension errors in sentence processing. Dr. Brooks joined the CSI faculty in 1997 after completing post-doctoral fellowships at Carnegie Mellon University and Emory University. She was appointed to the CUNY Graduate Center faculty in 1999, and is active in the Ph.D. programs in Developmental Psychology and Cognition, Brain & Behavior. Vera Kempe is a Professor and Chair in Psychology of Language Learning at the University of Abertay, Dundee. She has held posts at Carnege Mellon University, the University of Toledo, SUNY Oswego, and the University of Stirling. She has published extensively within her research areas, which include: the role of child-directed speech in language acquisition; crosslinguistic research and neural network modeling of language learning and processing; first and second language vocabulary acquisition and learning of inflectional morphology; Individual differences in language learning and in child-directed speech; emotion and communication.