Virginia Valian

Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Hunter College - one of the City University of New York's (CUNY's) senior colleges - and is a member of the doctoral faculties of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. She directs the Language Acquisition Research Center at Hunter College. She is co-founder and director of Hunter's Gender Equity Project.

I work in two fields - gender equity and the psychology of language.

In gender equity I perform research on the reasons behind women's slow advancement in the professions and politics and propose remedies for individuals and institutions. I am the author of Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (1998) and co-author, with Abigail Stewart, of An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence (2018). With students, I have performed research on attitudes and voting preferences in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. (See the first website below for relevant papers.) I give talks to and consult with institutions and organizations to improve gender equity. With students I create videos to introduce important concepts to explain gender gaps in achievement (see the second website below, which includes other helpful materials).

In the psychology of language I conduct research on young children's acquisition of syntax. I aim to develop a model of acquisition that specifies what is innate, how input is used by the child, and how the child's syntactic knowledge interacts with knowledge in other linguistic and extra-linguistic domains. I use a variety of methods, including computer-assisted corpus analysis, comprehension experiments, elicited imitation experiments, and elicited production experiments. (See the first website below.) I also conduct research on the relation between bilingualism and executive function in adults, and on bilingual processing of humor. With Irina Sekerina and Lauren Spradlin, I coedited Bilingualism, Executive Function, and Beyond (2019).

For more detail, see:

virginiavalian.org

genderequityproject.org

http://littlelinguist.hunter.cuny.edu/