Heidi Getz, Ph.D.

Dr. Getz’s research focuses on the acquisition of language by healthy children.

One line of research focuses on the learnability of complex grammatical patterns. Dr. Getz works on developing linguistically sophisticated theories of how children might acquire specific types of linguistic representations from exposure to particular types of sentences. These hypotheses are then tested experimentally in miniature language learning experiments, which allow for complete control of the input to which learners are exposed.

A second line of research focuses on language universals and learning biases. All natural languages have certain commonalities; where do these come from? One possibility is that there are biases in the way humans learn due to how our brains are organized, and that these biases affect how a language is represented in the minds of learners. In that case, natural languages might have certain common properties because learners introduce those properties when they are learning a language. To explore this possibility, Dr. Getz creates miniature languages that are either like or unlike natural languages in certain ways, and then asks how these languages are learned by children and adults. These studies illuminate the nature of children’s and adults’ learning biases and the ways in which these biases shape language structure.

Dr. Getz’s most recent work examines a phenomenon known as memory consolidation. Research on nonlinguistic memory has shown that that initially fragile memories can be strengthened, and sometimes changed qualitatively, over time and during sleep. This work asks how memory consolidation shapes linguistic knowledge during language learning by children and adults.

Education & Training
PhD, Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Georgetown University
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Georgetown University

• Contact Info
  202-687-2058
• hrg2@georgetown.edu