Diane Lillo-Martin is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

at the

University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut, a village in the town of Mansfield. The primary 4,400-acre (17.8 km2) campus is in Storrs, approximately a half hour's drive from Hart ...

. She is currently the Director of the university's Cognitive Sciences Program as well as its Coordinator of

American Sign Language American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual lang ...

Studies. She spent 12 years as Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut.

Research

Lillo-Martin received her PhD in 1986 from the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

, under the supervision of

Edward Klima Edward S. Klima (June 21, 1931 – September 25, 2008) was an American eminent linguist who specialized in the study of sign languages. Klima's work was heavily influenced by Noam Chomsky's then-revolutionary theory of the biological basis o ...

. She has become an eminent scholar in the fields of Monolingual and

Bilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...

First Language Acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

and the Structure and Acquisition of

. Her research focuses on what first language acquisition of

sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign l ...

s can tell us about

language universals A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, ''All languages have nouns and verbs'', or ''If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels.'' Research i ...

and how the human mind comes prepared to learn language. Lillo-Martin is the board chair of the Sign Language Linguistics Society and a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories. She is a Fellow of the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

. She is the former editor-in-chief of the journal

Language Acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

. She sat on the linguistics panel of the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

and was a review panel member and chair of the Language and Communication Study Section (LCOM) for the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

Major publications

Lillo-Martin's research has been published in and reviewed in numerous peer-reviewed journals and academic presses.

Books

* Sandler, Wendy & Lillo-Martin, Diane (2006). ''Sign Language and Linguistic Universals''.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Crain, Stephen & Lillo-Martin, Diane (1999). ''Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition''. Oxford: Blackwell. * Marschark, Marc, Siple, Patricia, Lillo-Martin, Diane, Campbell, Ruth, & Everhart, Victoria S. (1997). ''Relations of Language and Thought: The View from Sign Language and Deaf Children''. New York: Oxford University Press. * Lillo-Martin, Diane (1991). ''Universal Grammar and American Sign Language: Setting the Null Argument Parameter''s. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Journal articles and book chapters

* Berk, Stephanie & Lillo-Martin, Diane (2012). The Two-Word Stage: Motivated by Linguistic or Cognitive Constraints? Cognitive Psychology 65, 118-140. * Lillo-Martin, Diane (2009). Sign language acquisition studies. In Edith L. Bavin (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language, 399-415. New York: Cambridge University Press. * Lillo-Martin, Diane (2001). One syntax or two? Sign language and syntactic theory. Glot International 5.9-10, 297-310. * Lillo-Martin, Diane (1997). The acquisition of English by deaf signers: Is Universal Grammar involved? In Suzanne Flynn, Gita Martohardjono, & Wayne O’Neil (Eds.), The Generative Study of Second Language Acquisition, 131-149. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lillo-Martin, Diane Year of birth missing (living people) Living people University of Connecticut faculty Linguists from the United States Haskins Laboratories scientists Academic journal editors University of California, San Diego alumni Place of birth missing (living people) Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America Women linguists