Message from Chancellor Fox: One of UCSD’s greatest institutional strengths is the breadth and depth of faculty research on a range of important topics. Each month, Chancellor’s Corner will showcase cross-disciplinary faculty expertise in a specific area. I invite you to learn more about the work of these scholars, and I hope you share my pride in their achievements and their contributions to society.

LANGUAGE

Gedeon O. Deak, Assistant Professor, Department of Cognitive Science
Deák is a developmental psychologist who focuses on child and infant cognitive and social development. He can comment on topics relating to thinking and cognitive development, learning and early education, and language learning in young children; social knowledge in infants, social learning, and social interactions; and the origins of infantile autism. Some of the questions his work addresses include: how young children solve problems and manage their attention and thinking; how children develop the ability to select words and descriptions; and how infants learn to communicate with adult caregivers. More…

Jeff Elman, Professor, Department of Cognitive Science
Jeff Elman is interested in the biological foundations of language; in psycholinguistics, child language acquisition; computer modeling; Development (cognitive; language; brain) and Neural computation. He is one of the pioneers in the field of artificial neural networks. His early model of speech perception, the TRACE model, remains one of the major theories in the field. More…

Alison Wishard Guerra,
Assistant Professor, Department of Education Studies
Wishard’s work focuses on the cultural nature of child development, with a specific focus on early language/literacy and socio-emotional developmental competencies among Latino children. Her area of expertise is in early child development and early education. Her research interests focus on social and linguistic development in early childhood, with particular focus on developmental competencies among Latino children from low-income families. More…

Rick Grush, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
Rick Grush does reseach in theoretical cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of language, and metaphysics of mind and representation. Recently he has focused on the emulation theory of representation, and spatial and temporal representation. More…

Tom Humphries, Associate Director,
LSOE, Teacher Education and Department of Communication
Humphries has spent the past several years developing an experimental ASL-English Bilingual Education training curriculum which trains teachers to work with deaf children using an entirely new curriculum construct: the application of bilingual teaching practice to classrooms of deaf children. This project has a number of research goals related to the effectiveness of the curriculum and the impact that teachers finishing this program will have in the workplace once they are in service. Humphries also teaches Communication courses related to the problem of voice. More…

Carol Padden, Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of California, San Diego
I have been pursuing the convergence of three lines of research: reading development, language structure and cultural practices with respect to language and literacies. My dissertation, completed in 1983, was one of several describing syntactic structure in American Sign Language, demonstrating how differences in modality in speech and sign did not mask similarities in sentence structure. I have continued to publish on sign language structure, focusing more on aspects of structure that show evidence of interaction with culture and literacies. More…

Maria Polinsky, Professor, Department of Linguistics
Maria Polinsky is interested in language universals (ways in which languages are different and similar) and cognitive explanations for these universals. Much of her work focuses on endangered languages such as the languages of the Caucasus and Malayo-Polynesia. Polinsky has done field work on Malagasy, Crimean Tatar, Kabardian, Abkhaz, Chukchee, Armenian, Tsez, Rutul, several Bantu languages, Chuukese, and Vietnamese. More…

Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku,
Second Language Acquisition Theory & Language Pedagogy
Tohsaku is a specialist on second language acquisition theory and language pedagogy. His recent research focuses on the effects of instruction on language acquisition and learning. He is studying the effects of explicit grammar instruction on the development of language skills, how process-oriented vocabulary and grammar activities accelerate language acquisition, and higher-level cognitive skills in the development of reading abilities. He also has done research on a performance-oriented test for measuring overall Japanese language abilities, computer-based adaptive reading test, Internet-based placement test and other language tests. More…

Ana Celia Zentella, Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies
Ana Celia Zantella is an anthro-political linguist, and a central figure in the study of U.S. Latino varieties of Spanish and English, bilingualism, Spanglish, and English-only laws, focusing on the relationships of linguistic codes and the sociopolitical realities of ethnolinguistic speech communities. A primary focus of her work is the ways in which regional, racial, and class dialects of Spanish and English in Latino and African American communities in the United States and the Caribbean alternately harden and blur individual as well as group identities, and challenging traditional linguistic and cultural boundaries. Zantella can also speak about the dominant language ideologies and their implications for national language policies, e.g., the English-only movement in the U.S.A., and educational programs, e.g., bilingual and multicultural education, are related issues. More…

** To learn more about other campus faculty scholars and areas of expertise, please visit the searchable UCSD Faculty Experts Database at: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/facultyExperts/