Rosalind Thornton

Biography

I study children's acquisition of language, in particular, their acquisition of grammatical structures (syntax) and sentence meanings (semantics). My research is conducted within the framework of Chomsky's 'Universal Grammar'. The goal of my research is to understand which aspects of children's knowledge of language are in place at birth, and which aspects are learned over time from the environment. To understand children's developing grammars, I do experiments with young children. Recently, I have also been studying the grammars of children with language delay, sometimes termed specific language impairment. I am a CI in the Language Program of the ARC Centre of Cognition and its Disorders and Director of the Centre for Language Sciences. Within the Linguistics department, I am Research Director. 

Research Interest

Child language, acquisition of morphology, syntax and semantics, language development in children with language delay (specific language impairment)