Susanne Carroll

My connections to UQAM began when I was an M.A. (later doctoral) student at l'Université de Montréal in the mid-to-late 1970s. I worked on a research project of Lynn Drapeau's and Claire Lefebvre's, was an occasional chargée de cours, and happy participant in numerous colloquia and presentations by professors and students of UQAM and their many guests. At the time I was working on dislocations in French. Since c. 1986 I have worked exclusively on second language acquisition, principally on the theme of language learning mechanisms and the complex notion of "input".  I have published 3 books and over 60 articles and book chapters on various aspects of input and L2 acquisition, and most recently have been looking at what learners learn in conditions of controlled exposure, using what we call "Lab-languages". Our studies of "first exposure" learners have shown rapid vocabulary learning, 'top-down' facilitation effects from the L1 lexicon and we are now addressing issues of early morpho-syntactic learning, viz. word class and word-meaning mappings.