Karen Miller

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.