Karin Stromswold is a contemporary cognitive scientist and psycholinguist at Rutgers University whose research spans language acquisition, nativism, and the cognitive and genetic bases of language. She is known for empirical and theoretical work on how children acquire syntactic knowledge, including contributions to the poverty of the stimulus debate and learnability arguments in generative linguistics.
Advanced learnability arguments showing certain grammatical structures are underdetermined by primary linguistic data
Conducted large-scale studies on the acquisition of auxiliaries and syntactic categories in child language
Contributed behavioral and neuroimaging evidence to debates on the biological basis of language
Investigated genetic and twin-based factors in language acquisition and specific language impairment