Marie Coppola is a contemporary cognitive scientist and linguist at the University of Connecticut whose research focuses on language acquisition, homesign systems, and the origins of language structure. Her work investigates what grammatical knowledge children bring to language learning versus what can be induced from linguistic input, contributing empirical evidence to debates about linguistic nativism and learnability. She is particularly known for studying deaf children who develop homesign in the absence of conventional sign language input.
Empirical research on homesign systems as evidence for innate linguistic structure
Contributions to the poverty of the stimulus debate through acquisition studies
Cross-linguistic and cross-modal research on language emergence and learnability
Collaborative work on what grammatical properties arise independent of linguistic input