Ann Senghas

Ann Senghas, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Language Acquisition and Development Laboratory, joined the Barnard faculty in 1999. Her teaching includes courses in developmental psychology and language acquisition.

Before coming to Barnard, Professor Senghas held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Sign Language Research Center, the University of Rochester, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

Professor Senghas' current research examines the emergence of grammatical structure in a new sign language being created by a generation of deaf children and adolescents in Nicaragua. Each summer, Professor Senghas and her research group spend six weeks in Nicaragua, videotaping the signing of deaf children and adults, in order to document and analyze their continually changing language.

Professor Senghas studies the ways in which language learners and language users create ordered systems from disordered input and how this ability develops over the lifespan.

Professor Senghas' research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health. She has received a Frontiers of Science Fellow Award from the National Academies of Science and Engineering.