Our Mission Statement:

The mission of the newly formed Virtual Center for the Study of Language Acquisition is to foster collaborative work among researchers in the area of language acquisition, collaborations which are potentially interdisciplinary, which may be at a distance geographically and which may involve the comparative study of multiple languages, interactions on shared data, and a variety of experimental methods.

The VCLA includes:

• Researchers in several disciplines (among them developmental psychology, linguistics and neuroscience), and their associated labs.
• Different approaches and methods in the study of language acquisition, e.g, experimental or naturalistic, theoretical, behavioral or neuroscientific (brain imaging).
• Different areas of study: e.g, first language acquisition or multilingualism in the child, second language acquisition and multilingualism in the adult, as well as literacy and neuroscience.
• Various languages of study, ranging from English to Spanish to South Asian languages such as Sinhala and Tamil.
• Researchers from various countries collaborate internationally on the study of language acquisition.
• Researchers are linked in their motivation to cultivate research collaboration and to build materials and methods necessary for such collaboration, which can be shared widely in the field through the VCLA, including internationally.
• Researchers are linked in their assumption that the most fundamental questions of language acquisition now require interdisciplinary collaboration, both theoretical and empirical methods, and a cross-linguistic approach.

A Virtual Center for the Study of Language Acquisition (VCLA) has now been initiated through a Planning Grant Award from the NSF Development and Learning Sciences Program and their Children's Research Initiative (NSF BCS-0126546); award date: 9/25/01. Founding members of the Virtual Center include researchers at labs at 6 national institutions in addition to Cornell.