Southern Illinois University

Usha Lakshmanan
Professor

Dr. Usha Lakshmanan received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1989. She joined SIUC in 1990 and is currently Professor of Psychology, with a cross-appointment in the department of Linguistics.

Her research straddles the interrelated areas of child first language acquisition (monolingual and bilingual), child second language acquisition, adult second language acquisition and sentence processing. In her research, which focuses on the relationship between psycholinguistic theory and language acquisition, she has addressed several aspects of grammatical development from a cross-linguistic perspective. Her current projects include research on bilingual children's oral narratives in each of their two languages and the acquisition of relative clauses in Tamil, English and Hindi by trilingual children in India.

Selected Recent Publications

Books and Edited Volumes
Kunnan, A & U. Lakshmanan (Eds.). (2006). Language Assessment and Language Acquisition: A Crosslinguistic perspective. Language Assessment Quarterly, Special Issue: Vol. 3.

Selinker, L. & U. Lakshmanan. (Eds). (2001). Explanations and Scientific Method in Second Language Research. Special thematic Issue of the Journal Second Language Research. 17.

Articles and Chapters

Kim, K. L. & Lakshmanan, U. (2009). The processing role of the Article Choice Parameter: Evidence from L2 learners of English. In M. P. G. Mayo & RR. Hawkins (Eds.). Second language acquisition of articles: Empirical findings and theoretical implications (pp. 87-113). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lakshmanan, U. (2009). Child second language acquisition. In W. Ritchie & T. Bhatia, (Eds.). The new handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 377-399). Sheffield, UK: Emerald Publishers.

Lakshmanan, U., Kim, K. L., McCreary, R., Park, K-S., Suen, U., & Lee, S. (2009). L2 learners’ sensitivity to strong and weak subjacency-violations in online processing. In M. Bowles, T. Ionin, S. Montrul & A. Tremblay (Eds.). Proceedings of the 10th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (pp. 136-143). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Park, K and U. Lakshmanan (2007). The L2 Acquisition of the unaccusative-unergative distinction in English resultatives. In H. Caunt-Nulton, S. Kulatilake & I. Woo (Eds.). Proceedings of the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 508-519). Somerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press.

Lakshmanan, U. (2006). Assessing Linguistic Competence: Verbal Inflection in child Tamil. Language Assessment Quarterly, 3, 171-206.