Research Interests:

Gesture and sign language research, bilingualism and second language acquisition, sentence processing and literacy.

Research Opportunities:

Are you interested in sign language, gesture, language learning, or bilingualism?

If so, you have the opportunity to work one-on-one with a faculty member who is fluent in ASL and is conducting research on how people learn sign and spoken languages, what people communicate when they gesture, and how being hearing or deaf might affect how we process language in general.

You will get hands-on research experience in a collaborative lab and choose to sign up for independent study credits in Linguistics, Psychology, or Spanish, depending on your interests.

ASL skills or knowledge of languages other than English is a plus but not required. Signers and deaf students are particularly encouraged to apply.

For more information, please contact me at pinar@psu.edu or dalias64@gmail.com. My office on campus is located in room 450 Burrows Building and my lab is in Room 3 in the Moore Building.

Recent Publications:

Dussias, P. and Piñar, P. (In press) Effects of reading span and plausibility in the reanalysis of wh-gaps by Chinese-English bilinguals. Journal of Second Language Research.

Dussias, P. and Piñar, P. (Under review) Sentence Parsing in L2 learners: Linguistic and Experience-based Factors . In William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia (Eds.) The New Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, Elsevier Press..

Taub, S., Galvan, D., & Piñar, P. The role of gesture in crossmodal typological studies (In Press) Cognitive Linguistics.

Taub, S., Galvan, D.  Piñar, P. & Mather, S. Gesture and ASL L2 Acquisition. (In press) In Muller de Quadros, R. (ed.) Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research 9.

Piñar, P., Ammons, D., & Montenegro, F. (2008) Incorporating Foreign Sign Language in Foreign Language Instruction for Deaf Students: Cultural and Methodological Rationale. In Tammy Berberi, Elizabeth C. Hamilton, and Ian M. Sutherland (Eds.), Worlds Apart?: Disability and Foreign Language Learning (pp. 137-150). New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.

Taub, S. & Piñar, P. (2006) A comparison of the Informational Content of Speech/Gesture and Sign. In Proceedings of the 27th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society.

Piñar. P. Español en Vivo: Conversations with native speakers, (textbook and DVD), New Haven, Connecticut:Yale University Press (2004).