Carolyn Mylander is a developmental psychologist and researcher best known for her collaborative work with Susan Goldin-Meadow on homesign — the spontaneous gestural communication systems developed by deaf children without access to conventional sign language. Her empirical studies have provided significant evidence bearing on debates about language innateness and the role of primary linguistic data in grammar acquisition. Her work sits at the intersection of developmental psychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language.
Co-authored foundational homesign studies demonstrating children develop structured language-like gesture without linguistic input
Provided empirical data relevant to the poverty of the stimulus argument and grammar learnability debates
Cross-cultural homesign research comparing deaf children in the US and China, showing universality of spontaneous grammatical structure
Contributed to debates on the relationship between primary linguistic data (pld) and innate linguistic capacity