Prof. Senghas is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Barnard College. She is the director of the Language Acquisition and Development Research Laboratory, where she and her lab members conduct studies in language development, emergence, and change. She also teaches classes in psychology, human development, and language acquisition.

Molly is a recent graduate of Columbia College where she studied Psychology and Spanish Literature. She joined the LADR lab in March of 2004 and is currently serving as lab manager. Molly has also worked with Professors Herb Terrace, Lisa Son, and Janet Metcalfe. The monkeys from the Terrace Lab would sure miss her if she didn’t still visit them weekly. She loves languages and is currently studying American Sign Language and German while trying to keep up her Spanish and French. In her free time she enjoys gazing at the NYC stars (both of them), reading up on the latest early hominid discoveries, following the Mars rovers and Cassini at Saturn and singing in Columbia’s Glee Club.

Shira recently graduated from Columbia University with a degree in biomedical engineering and a minor in psychology. She made her debut in the LADR lab in summer 2001, and has gleefully served as lab manager fall 2002-spring 2004. She has since escaped to Bethesda, Maryland where she now helps the NIH decide how to distribute their funds. She continues her collaboration with the lab particularly in investigations of the number system of Nicaraguan Sign Language. Shira has a curiously strong attraction to languages of all denominations, particularly their grammatical patterns and etymologies. When (if) she's off the clock, she enjoys reading counterfactual histories and writing calligraphy on grains of rice.

Sarah is a PhD student in Bilingual School Psychology at Fordham University. She graduated from Barnard in the class of 2003 with a major in psychology and Spanish, and wrote a thesis on the transition from gesture to sign language in Nicaraguan Sign Language and Spanish Sign Language (LSE). She spent the spring semester of her junior year in Seville, Spain, where she collected data on LSE (between classes). A Howard Hughes Foundation Science Pipeline Project Fellowship supported her field trip to Nicaragua in the summer of 2001 and her work in the LADR lab for the following academic year. She continues to work on the Gesture-to-Sign project (between classes).

Jennie recently received her PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. In the Fall of 2004 she became a postdoctoral fellow in the program in Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego. Jennie received her BA from Smith College in 1997 (and, like Ann, worked with Jill and Peter de Villiers there). She began her collaboration with the LADR lab in 2000, and continues to study the expression of mental states in Nicaraguan Sign Language and American Sign Language. She is particularly interested in how mental language interacts with cognitive development.

Alina recently graduated from Brown University, where she majored in Community Health. She wrote her thesis on the recent history of Nicaragua (particularly the Sandinista Revolution) and how it shaped the daily experience of Deaf Nicaraguans, including a new language and a new, thriving Deaf community. Alina grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Alina is Deaf and is bilingual in American Sign Language and English and is adding Nicaraguan Sign Language to the list. She has worked at the Rhode Island Commission on the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance, and co-taught courses in American Sign Language and Cued Speech. She joined the LADR Lab in the summer of 2003, just in time to be roped into a summer fieldtrip. Here she has worked primarily on the Lexicon Project, studying development of the vocabulary of Nicaraguan Sign Language.

Marisol is a graduate of New York University. She majored in Education, specializing in Child Development. Marisol is a native speaker of English and Spanish and serves as the LADR Lab’s linguistic and cultural liaison, assisting in correspondence and communication with the Nicaraguan families and administrators who participate in our research. She also works as a research assistant, working primarily on the Gesture-to-Sign project. She joined the summer fieldtrips in 2002 and 2003, and has been the lab scribe, logging the group’s daily trials and travails. She currently works at a bilingual preschool on the Upper West Side called La Escuelita.