MEMBER

Daniel Valois is Honorary Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Translation at University of Montreal where he teaches and conducts research in theoretical syntax, language acquisition and psycholinguistics. He received a Ph.D. in linguistics from UCLA in 1991, specializing in formal syntax. His early work aimed at assimilating the structure of noun phrases to that of clauses, especially with respect to adjective/adverb placement and argument structure. Publications on this topic appeared in various refereed journals, including Linguistic Inquiry and the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, as well in Blackwell’s Syntax Companion and other major collective publications. His work has been presented at major conferences such as the North Eastern Language Society (NELS), the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), the Generative Linguists of the Old World (GLOW) conference, the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Linguistics (LSRL), Going Romance, and Neurobiology of Language. He has been a member of the editorial board of Probus, a prominent journal of Romance linguistics, since 1996.

Dr. Valois has since developed interests in first language acquisition research as well as in the neurological bases of language, and the relationship between the two. Of particular interest is the role played by language acquisition data in the development of syntactic theory, and the relationship between language and general cognition. Papers on language acquisition appeared in Probus, Language Acquisition, the Journal of French Language Studies and the proceedings of the Boston Conference on Child Language Development, Brain and Language (autism) among others. Recent projects have included ERP analyses of argument structure, nominal agreement and conceptual semantics, the effect of music training on the syntactic competence of language-impaired patients, and the neurological aspects of morphological derivation processing.