Shanley Allen
Linguist
- 2 min read
- 3 chapters
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Through Linguistics and Germany
Biography
Allen initially studied Hispanic Studies at McGill University, graduating with a B.A. in 1985. She earned her PhD at McGill in 1994, writing her dissertation on Acquisition of some mechanisms of transitivity alternation in Arctic Quebec Inuktitut under the supervision of Lydia White.
She took up a position as research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen from 1994-1998. In 1999, Allen took up a position as assistant professor in the School of Education at Boston University, becoming promoted to associate professor in 2002. She moved to Germany in 2010 to take up a W2 professorship at Kaiserslautern, and since 2012 she has been full professor (W3) and leader of the Psycholinguistics and Language Development Group there.
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Honors and awards
Allen has been the recipient of various awards, honours and grants. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Mary R. Haas Book Award by the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas in 1995. Between 2010 and 2016 she was the recipient of a Dual Career Professorship awarded by the Claussen-Simon Foundation, covering half of her professorial salary for six years.
Since 2018 she has been one of the principal investigators on the Research Unit ‘Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations: A Comparative Approach’ (RUEG), along with Heike Wiese, Artemis Alexiadou, Natalia Gagarina, Anke Lüdeling, Christoph Schroeder, Luka Szucsich, Rosemarie Tracy, and Sabine Zerbian.
In 2020 she was elected as a Member of the Academia Europaea.
In 2024 she was elected as a President of The International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL).
Research
Allen's work in psycholinguistics investigates the extent to which first language development is affected by cross-linguistic differences in morphosyntactic structure, the universality of language learning, and interactions between languages in multilingual speakers. Inuktitut has been at the centre of much of her research since her dissertation, but she has also worked on Basque, English, German, Japanese and Spanish. Her research employs a variety of empirical methods, including elicited production, eye-tracking, self-paced reading tasks, and naturalistic observation.