Kate Harrigan joins W&M Linguistics and Psychology
We are thrilled to welcome Kaitlyn Harrigan, Lecturer of Psychology and Linguistics, to the W&M faculty. Professor Harrigan earned her PhD in Linguistics from University of 玛丽land, College Park. Her courses will include general linguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and social cognitive development.
Q. Where were you born and where are you from?
I am from a small town in upstate NY called Cato, which is near Syracuse. It has one stoplight and a population of 2500! I did my undergrad at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and got my PhD in Linguistics at the University of 玛丽land. Most recently, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Psychology department at the University of Delaware.
Q. Tell us about your research.
My work has been in the field of language acquisition-- how children learn their first language.
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showed that children are sensitive to syntactic structure in interpreting unknown verbs of this type, suggesting that this might be a critical piece of how children solve this puzzle.
Q. How did you get started in this type of research?
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Q. On a scale of 1-10, how wonderful are your students at W&M so far?
This is an easy one! 10! Every faculty member that I talked to throughout my interview process told me how wonderful the students here are, so I wasn't surprised! But I can tell even from the first few weeks of classes that the students are smart and engaged. They ask good questions and think critically about the reading. It is so much fun teaching students of this caliber!
