Susan Curtiss' main fields of interest fall within psycholinguistics and
neurolinguistics. Her work is focused in four areas. First, she studies
grammatical development in children with SLI and the ways and reasons why
it differs from grammatical development in normally developing children.
This work has found considerable overlap with normal children in the patterns
and "stages" of grammatical development alongside impaired auditory processing
mechanisms which slow and impede linguistic growth. Second, she is interesed
in maturational constraints on first language development ("Critical period"
effects), and her work indicates that the greatest effects are on syntax
and syntactically-driven morphology and that these effects increase with
age at acquisition. Third, her work on hemispheric specialization for language
and language acquisition has found surprising similarities in linguistic
performance in different clinical types of adult acquired aphasias, and in
children, significant delays and impairments in language development after
damage to both hemispheres. Fourth, her work on the modularity of grammar
has resulted in empirical evidence that grammar is a distinct cognitive module
in development and adulthood.
Downloadable Papers (for free PDF reader, click
here)
-
How
normal is grammatical development in the right hemisphere following
hemispherectomy? The root infinitive stage and beyond with S. de
Bode.
-
"GCS: A Grammatical Coding System for Natural
Language Data" with Jeff MacSwan, Jeannette Schaeffer, Mural Kural and
Tetsuya Sano
-
(with Jeff Mac Swan, Jeanette Schaeffer, Murat Kural, and Tetsuya Sano) "GCS
- Grammatical Coding System Manual". Available on line in
PDF format. (66 pages)
-
(with Jeannette Schaeffer) "Syntactic development in children with
hemispherectomy: the Infl-System" (available online in Word
Perfect 6.0 for Windows format, Postscript format,
and PDF format).
-
"Spoken Language Outcomes After Hemispherectomy: Factoring in Etiology,"
by Susan Curtiss, Stella de Bode, and Gary W. Mathern.
Word format/PDF
format
Selected Publications
-
(with Kempler, Metter, Jackson and Hanson) "Grammatical comprehension, aphasic
syndromes, and neuroimaging." Journal of Neurolinguistics, 6/3, 301-318
(1991)
-
(with W. Katz and P. Tallal) "Delay vs. Deviance in the language acquisition
of language impaired children." Journal of Speech and Hearing Research,
35, 373-383 (1992)
-
"Language as a cognitive system: its independence and selective vulnerability."
In C. Otero, ed., Noam Chomsky Critical Assessments: 4. Routledge.
(1994)
Back to Faculty Listings
Return to Linguistics Dept. Homepage
