Barbara C. Lust

Barbara C. Lust, PhD, is a professor of developmental psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science at Cornell University, where she has taught for more than 30 years.

There, she and her students and collaborators have built the Cornell University Language Acquisition Lab, which houses and supports ongoing research on language acquisition involving more than 20 languages. Together they have constructed a range of materials for the crosslinguistic interdisciplinary study of language acquisition.

Her research interests focus on crosslinguistic analyses of language acquisition with a view to factoring out universal from language-specific factors in a comprehensive theory.

In addition to numerous journal and book articles, she has authored Child Language: Acquisition and Growth (2006; new edition in preparation). With Claire Foley, she coedited Language Acquisition: The Essential Readings (2004). With María Blume, she codirected the development of an international cyberinfrastructure-based project to support research and teaching in an interdisciplinary framework, “Transforming the Primary Research Process Through Cybertool Dissemination: An Implementation of a Virtual Center for the Study of Language Acquisition” (NSF CI-0753415).