Shanley Allen

Associate Professor of Education
BA, PhD, McGill University

Dr. Allen’s research and teaching interests are in the areas of monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, as well as linguistic description and theory. She has published numerous articles and a book on the first language acquisition of morphology, syntax, and discourse by preschool Inuktitut-speaking Inuit (Eskimo) children, as well as articles on specific language impairment and narrative development in older Inuit children. She has followed three different lines of research in recent years. The first focuses on the development of speech and gestures about motion events in children speaking typologically different languages. The second assesses code mixing in bilingual preschool children learning Inuktitut and English. The third investigates the role of children’s understanding of the knowledge of their interlocutors in the way they choose to realize subjects and objects in their speech. Dr. Allen has also directed a professional development project helping teachers to improve instruction of bilingual students in mainstream educational settings. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Allen is a participating faculty member in the Applied Linguistics Program at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. She is also faculty advisor to the annual international Boston University Conference on Language Development, is on the Editorial Board of the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Child Language, published by Cambridge University Press.