Biography
Marlyse Baptista is a contact linguist and morphosyntactician specialized in pidgin and creole languages (and their source languages).
She has a particular interest in cognition and theoretical models of language contact, language emergence, and change. With collaborators, she uses experimental methods (involving artificial language learning) to investigate how languages and their speakers converge, diverge, and innovate in multilingual settings. She also uses fieldwork data and tools from generative syntax to study the grammatical properties of pidgins and creoles.
Her current research investigates the cognitive processes involved in contact situations and focuses on the role of congruence in L2 acquisition (Baptista et al., 2016), bilingualism, multilingualism (Labotka et al., 2023), and creole genesis and development (Baptista, 2006; 2020).
She directs the Language Contact and Cognition Lab in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania (formerly known as the Cognition, Convergence and Language Emergence (CCLE) Research Group when it was hosted in the Linguistics Department at the University of Michigan). She is also faculty in MindCore at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (France), UMR 7023 “Structures Formelles du Langage/Groupe de Recherche Grammaires Créoles.”