Aliyah Morgenstern

Email: Aliyah(dot)Morgenstern@sorbonne-nouvelle(dot)fr

Dr. Aliyah Morgenstern is a full Professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Vice-Rector for European Affairs and a member of the University’s Research Ethics Committee. She majored in English Studies and Linguistics at Ecole Normale Supérieure Fontenay-St Cloud in France. She holds a PhD from Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Linguistics on children’s development of self-words in English, French and French sign language (LSF) and a Habilitation in Linguistics and child language acquisition.

Her research is focused on language development, language socialization and multimodal interaction. She uses a socio-functional approach to analyze how children’s language gradually develops into rich linguistic constructions containing multiple cross-modal elements through constant exposure to adult input in interaction. She studies how children’s first syncretic multimodal buds blossom into more complex constructions, including creative non-standard forms and how they bloom into full multimodal intricate productions containing positioning, displacement and argumentation.

She has supervised over a dozen funded national and international projects and has published 2 monographs, 3 edited volumes, 3 special issues and over 200 papers using socio-pragmatic, constructionist and functionalist perspectives with multimodal approaches to spontaneous data. She is currently the coordinating PI of a project on French family dinners (French and LSF) funded by the French national agency and is the French PI in a Project on Multimodal child language development lead by Professor Alan Rumsey and funded by the Australian National research agency.

She has been Vice-President of the International Society of Gesture studies (ISGS), President of the French Association for Cognitive Linguistics (AFLICO). She was also Action Editor of Language Development Research when it was first launched, is currently Subject Editor of Languages and Modalities and is a member of the Editorial Boards of Language and Cognition; Faits de Langues; Cognitextes; Language, Interaction and Acquisition; and Discourse.