Virginia Valian
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Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Hunter College – CUNY and Distinguished Professor in the CUNY Graduate Center doctoral programs of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech Language Hearing Sciences. She is founder and director of the Language Acquisition Research Center at Hunter College and co-founder and director of the Gender Equity Project at Hunter College. In her work on first language acquisition she studies two- and three-year-olds’ knowledge of abstract structure, using corpus analysis of natural child speech, elicited imitation, syntactic priming, and comprehension tasks. In her work on bilingualism she investigates the connection, if any, between bilingualism and higher cognitive processes. In her work on gender she asks why so few women are in positions of power and prestige. She has been a visiting scientist in London, Utrecht, Paris, Hamburg, Venice, Barcelona, and Sydney. She is a fellow of the Psychonomic Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and American Women in Science. She is a member of the Armenian Society of Fellows and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In October 2023, she joins the IAS for a one-month writing fellowship.
Research Interests
First language acquisition, with an emphasis on syntax and morphosyntax; bilingualism and cognition; the role of gender schemas in professional and political life.
Are executive functions immutable?
Direct consequences of being bilingual include appreciating literature in another language and finding just the right word for an experience. Another direct consequence is changes in brain networks. Both might suggest benefits for higher level cognition. But whether there are global indirect benefits, such as increasing one's ability to manage stimuli that are at odds with each other, or to switch more easily from one task to another, is unclear.
As more reviews and large scale studies cast doubt on the existence of bilingual benefits for executive or attentional control, the opportunity arises to rethink the basis on which one would expect broad cognitive benefits from bilingualism or other cognitively enriching experiences.This project considers the possiblity that the natural intuition behind the expectation that bilingualism will have benefits for higher cognitive functions is incorrect. Executive functions may be immutable in early and middle adulthood. They are recruited for a wide variety of tasks, but improvement in performing those tasks does not in turn affect executive functions themselves.
This project questions assumptions and hypotheses about the relations that hold among behavior, cognition, and the brain. In so doing, it will increase the possibility of understanding how the three interconnect. The hypothesis is that executive functions and higher-order cognitive functions are used to develop skills but are not themselves affected by skill development.
Key publications
Stewart, A. & Valian, V. (2018). An inclusive academy: Achieving diversity and excellence (528 pages). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Multiple printings.(Paperback October 2022).
Sekerina, I. A., Spradlin, L., & Valian, V. V. (2019). Editors. Bilingualism, executive function, and beyond: Questions and insights, SiBiL Series. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Valian, V. (2015). Bilingualism and cognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18 (01), 3-24. [keynote article]. Two supplemental appendices are available through the journal.
Valian, V. (1998). Why so slow? The advancement of women (421 pages). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Paperback January 1999; multiple printings).
Latest Publications
Xu, Q., Chodorow, M., & Valian, V. (2023). How infants' utterances grow: A probabilistic account of early language development. Cognition, 230.
Ezrina, E. V. & Valian, V. (2022). Do bilinguals get the joke? Humor comprehension in mono- and bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
 Third session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" talk series, with the participation of Virginia Valian, Hunter College, City University of New York / CUNY Center |
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