University of Connecticut |
Trustees award highest honor to CLAS faculty
Two faculty members in CLAS, Diane C. Lillo-Martin and Gregory J. Anderson, were named Board of Trustees Distinguished Professors, the University’s highest honor to faculty, at the trustees’ April meeting. Lillo-Martin, professor of linguistics and former department head, studies how children acquire their native language. Her latest research focuses on young children who are learning both spoken and sign language, so-called "bimodal bilinguals." Some children have two deaf parents who sign, and those youngsters do not have difficulty acquiring spoken as well as sign language, she says. "They are amazing in their ability to go back and forth with languages – they learn so much, so fast," she says. By using American Sign Language with signers and spoken language with speakers, they learn to appropriately alternate between the two. Children and adults who know both languages also sometimes use them simultaneously; this is known as “code blending.” The younger that children learn sign or a spoken second language, the better, she says. In one project, she studied deaf children who were not exposed to sign language until they were six years old. While they picked up some parts of the language quickly, "You can tell they’re different – almost like a foreign accent." She also has a new project studying language acquisition by deaf children with cochlear implants. "Some deaf children with cochlear implants can become pretty fluent in both (sign and spoken) languages and go back and forth," she says. She studies how they do this, and how they are like or unlike hearing bimodal-bilingual children. Sign language can actually help children learn spoken language, she theorizes; deaf children can learn through sign language while they are being taught the spoken language. Lillo-Martin collaborates on research with a colleague in Brazil who was a visiting scholar at UConn, Ronice Müller de Quadros, and a former PhD student from UConn who is now at Gallaudet University, Deborah Chen Pichler. Lillo-Martin came to UConn in 1986 as an assistant professor. She was born and raised in southern California and received her PhD in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego. While a graduate student, she was a research assistant at The Salk Institute in La Jolla. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Language Acquisition and previously served on the executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America. She is a member of the Board of Corporators of the American School for the Deaf. Gregory J. Anderson, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, stepped down last year as vice provost for research and graduate education and research and dean of the Graduate School. This year he has a one-year appointment in Washington, DC, as graduate dean in residence at the Council of Graduate Schools and the National Science Foundation, a position supported by the NSF and involving projects of interest to both organizations.
His focus in Washington is to promote international graduate experiences in research and education. He also works on ways to improve the mentoring of postdoctoral associates so that they have opportunities to grow professionally, obtain grants, and publish. He organized an international meeting for program officers and graduate deans at NSF earlier this month on globalizing graduate education and research. Interest is rapidly growing in joint and dual degrees with an international connection, he notes. His own research on the origin and evolution of domesticated plants and in conservation biology and biodiversity has taken him around the world. He has international field experience in Costa Rica and the Caribbean, Mexico, South America, Australia, Spain, and South Africa. One of the areas he studies, the reproductive biology of island plants, involves a serious conservation problem, he says, particularly on oceanic islands if only one seed is deposited. Effective conservation requires understanding all elements of biology, including conserving plant pollinators so that plants can survive past the current generation. The conservation problem of islands is being extended to land spaces on continents, too, Anderson says. As native forests and plants diminish – prairie plants in the Midwest, for example – the land is left with "continental islands" where the need for conserving plant and animal species is similar to that on oceanic islands. Anderson came to UConn in 1973 as an assistant professor after two years in a similar post at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He earned his PhD from Indiana University. He was chosen a Distinguished Alumni Professor at UConn in 1997. He has been president of the Society for Economic Botany, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences, whose Distinguished Service Award he won for 2002. He was also president of the Botanical Society of America and was one of 100 recipients of its Centennial Award in 2006, the society’s 100th year. He was a one-term chair of the Senate Executive Committee at UConn and served for more than 20 years on the executive committee of the Graduate School’s Graduate Faculty Council. He also chaired a state of Connecticut legislative task force on fuel diversification. Three species, all small, herbaceous shrubs from Latin America, have been named after Anderson, honoring his work on the biology of plants in the potato/tomato/pepper family. To hear podcasts by the two new awardees, go to: Anderson: http://www.clas.uconn.edu/facultysnapshots/view.php?id=anderson Lillo-Martin: http://www.clas.uconn.edu/facultysnapshots/view.php?id=lillo-martin
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