Jill G. de Villiers (born 1948) is a developmental psychologist known for her work in the field of language acquisition. ^[1] She is the Sophia and Austin Smith Professor Emerita of Psychology and Philosophy at Smith College. ^[2] de Villiers is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. In 2018, she was elected as a Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. ^[1]

de Villiers and her colleagues have developed critical tools for language assessment including the Quick Interactive Language Screener (QUILS), ^[3] which is a computerized preschool language assessment, and the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV), which aims to provide assessment for speakers of English dialects such as African-American English. ^{[4] [5]}

Biography

de Villiers completed her B.S. degree in psychology from the University of Reading in 1969. ^[2] She attended graduate school at Harvard University where she obtained her Ph.D in experimental psychology at 1974 under the supervision of Roger Brown. ^[6] After graduating, she taught at Harvard University for 8 years before moving to Smith College in 1971. At Smith, she received the Honored Professor award in 2003 and the Faculty Teaching award in 2002. ^[2]

de Villiers work focuses on language acquisition, with a specific focus on young children's ability to use words and sentences to communicate with others. Her many contributions include studies of language acquisition in oral deaf children ^[7] and relationships between language development and theory of mind. ^{[8] [9]} de Villiers' research has been funded by the March of Dimes, ^[10] National Science Foundation, ^[11] the Institute of Education Sciences, ^[12] and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. ^[13]

Books

• de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (1978). Language acquisitions . Harvard University Press.
• de Villiers, J., & Roeper, T. (Eds.). (2011). Handbook of generative approaches to language acquisition. Springer Science & Business Media.

Representative publications

• de Villiers, J. G. (2007). The interface of language and theory of mind. Lingua , 117 (11), 1858–1878.
• de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2(3), 267–278.
• de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (1973). Development of the use of word order in comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2(4), 331–341.
• de Villiers, J. G., Flusberg, H. B. T., Hakuta, K., & Cohen, M. (1979). Children's comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 8(5), 499–518.
• de Villiers, J. G., & Pyers, J. E. (2002). Complements to cognition: A longitudinal study of the relationship between complex syntax and false-belief-understanding. Cognitive Development , 17 (1), 1037–1060.

References

External links

• Faculty Homepage
• Jill de Villiers publications indexed by Google Scholar