Roberta Michnick Golinkoff Biography

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff holds the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair in the School of Education at the University of Delaware and is also a member of the Departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Linguistics and Cognitive Science. An award-winning author of 14 books and over 150 professional articles on early childhood and infant development, she founded and directs the Child's Play, Learning, and Development Laboratory (formerly called The Infant Language Project), which investigates how young children learn their native language . Among her current projects is the creation of a computerized language assessment for preschoolers called the QUILS: Quick Interactive Language Screener. Created with Jill de Villiers, Aquiles Iglesias, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Mary Wilson with a grant from the Institute for Education Sciences, the screener is dialect and culture free, measures receptive vocabulary, syntax, and children's language learning abilities, and takes 15-minutes to administer on a touch screen. It will be brought out by Brookes Publishing in the Winter of 2017. She is also involved with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University and the Brookings Institution and David Dickinson of Vanderbilt University, on a project to teach vocabulary to disadvantaged preschoolers through playful learning. Research on the conceptual underpinnings of language has brought her to the study of event perception in infants and how language itself may influence infants' attention to the events their language encodes.