Karen Miller
Professor of Spanish and Linguistics
- 245 Burrowes Building
Biography
Karen Miller is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Penn State. She received a Ph.D. in linguistics and cognitive science from Michigan State University in 2007. Her field of research centers on first language acquisition in English and Spanish-speaking children and she has been working with children in Chile, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. She is especially interested in how sociolinguistic variation is acquired by children and the extent to which variable input affects the acquisition of grammatical morphology. Other areas of research in which she is interested include bilingualism in children and the effect of variation on language processing in children and adults.
Recent Publications:
- Shin, N. & Miller, K. (2023) Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation: A Reply to Commentaries. Language Learning & Development.
- Lukyanenko, C., & Miller, K. (2023) Agreeing when to disagree: A corpus analysis of variable agreement in caregiver and child English. Language Variation and Change, 35(1), 29-54. doi:10.1017/S0954394523000054
- Dussias, P. E., & Miller, K. (2023) Eye-tracking Methods in Child SLA Research. In Yuko Goto Butler & Becky Huang, (eds.), Research methods for understanding child second language development Routledge.
- Shin, N., & Miller, K. (2021) Children’s acquisition of morphosyntactic variation. Language Learning & Development, https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1941031.
- Gomez, D., Holtheuer, C., Miller, K. & Schmitt, C. (2021) Children’s and adults’ eye movements and the extraction of number information from redundant markings. Cognition 213(6), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104700.
- *Callen, M. C., & Miller, K. (2021) Linguistic variation in the acquisition of morphosyntax: Variable object marking in the speech of Mexican children and their caregivers. Language Learning & Development, https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1977133.
- *Brehm, L., Jackson, C. N., & Miller, K. (2021) Probabilistic online processing of sentence anomalies. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 36(8), 959-983.
- Miller, K. (2021) Copula Choice is Associated with Discourse Integration Skills in Spanish-speaking Children. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 42(8), 433-457.
Research Interests
First language acquisition, bilingualism, language variation
Courses Regularly Taught
400 Level
3 Credits
SPAN 417 How Languages Are Learned
This class is a linguistics course that focuses on language acquisition in children and adults. Linguistics is the scientific study of language and its structure, and linguistic inquiry focuses on various levels of language: phonology examines the sounds of language, morphology examines the structure of words (e.g., root words and their inflections), and syntax focuses on the structure of phrases and sentences. Using the tools of phonology, morphology, and syntax, this course will address the following questions. What is unique about human language? How is language learned in infancy? How do humans learn additional languages after they have learned their first language? How does bilingual language development compare to monolingual language development? Can knowing more than one language actually be detrimental? What are the different languages spoken by bilinguals in the Spanish-speaking world? What sorts of bilingual education programs are there in the Spanish-speaking world, including in the U.S.? By answering these questions, this course introduces students to bilingualism and bilingual language acquisition.
Prerequisite
(SPAN 100A or SPAN 200) and SPAN 215
Bachelor of Arts
World Language (All), Social and Behavioral Sciences
3 Credits
Graduate Linguistics
SPAN 508 Generative Syntax
This course offers foundations of generative syntax. It addresses the advantage of a scientific model to explain human knowledge of language that also makes predictions about its representation in the mind.
3 Credits
Graduate Linguistics
SPAN 597 Language Acquisition and Variation
This course brings together research in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and first and second language acquisition in order to prepare students to investigate how learners acquire and process sociolinguistic variation. The course will cover various corpus and experimental studies on the acquisition of variation and review how these studies inform models of L1 and L2 acquisition. The goal of the course is for students to draw from these various sub-disciplines of linguistics and create a project that integrates language variation and language acquisition.
Class Times
Tuesdays, Thursdays from 1:35 p.m.-2:50 p.m.
Current Graduate Advisees
