Karen Miller
- 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
Courses Regularly Taught
200 Level
3 Credits
Fall 2026 Semester
Class Times
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays from 10:10 a.m–11:00 a.m., Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays from 11:15 a.m.–12:05 p.m.
Class Times
Tuesdays, Thursdays from 10:35 p.m.–11:50 a.m., Tuesdays, Thursdays from 1:35 p.m.–2:50 p.m., Tuesdays, Thursdays from 3:05 p.m.–4:20 p.m.
Prerequisite
SPAN 100 or by placement
Bachelor of Arts
World Language (All), World Lang (12th Unit)
Exceeds 12th Unit of World Language
200 Level
3 Credits
Spring 2027 Semester
Class Times
Mondays, Wednesdays from 11:15 a.m.–12:05 p.m.
Prerequisite
SPAN 100 or SPAN 100A or SPAN 100B or SPAN 100C or SPAN 100H or SPAN 200
Bachelor of Arts
World Language (All), Humanities, World Cultures, Social and Behavioral Sciences
General Education
Humanities (GH), Social and Behavioral Scien (GS), Integrative: Interdomain Honors
GenEd Learning Objective
Effective Communication, Crit and Analytical Think, Integrative Thinking, Key Literacies
This course is required toward the Spanish major and can count toward the Spanish minor
3 Credits
Fall 2026 Semester
Graduate Linguistics
Class Times
Tuesdays, Thursdays from 9:05 a.m.–10:20 a.m.
3 Credits
Graduate Linguistics
Class Times
Tuesdays, Thursdays from 1:35 p.m.-2:50 p.m.
Current Graduate Advisees
