Shanley Allen

Email: allen(at)sowi(dot)uni-kl(dot)de

Dr. Shanley Allen is Professor of Psycholinguistics and Language Development at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. She received a B.A. in Hispanic Studies and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her previous academic positions include Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, Netherlands) and Assistant and Associate Professor of Education at Boston University (Boston, USA).

Shanley’s research focuses on the development of morphosyntax, with a particular interest in how cross-linguistic differences influence language development. She has published extensively on the development of argument structure and other morphosyntactic phenomena in Inuktitut, on the role of discourse-pragmatics in children’s referential choice cross-linguistically, and on language processing in L1 and bilingual children and adults. She has also published on the relation between gesture and speech in describing motion events, the role of child-directed speech in language development, and the structure of code mixing. A current major focus is the Acquisition Sketch Project, an initiative to increase the diversity of languages represented in language acquisition research. Her work has been funded by the German Research Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Kativik School Board.

Shanley is currently Series Editor of the Trends in Language Acquisition Research book series published by John Benjamins, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Child Language and of the International Journal of Language Studies. From 2001 to 2010, she served as Faculty Advisor for the Boston University Conference on Language Development.

(Photo credit: TU Kaiserslautern/Koziel)