Bonnie D. Schwartz

Bonnie D. Schwartz is a Professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, serving in multiple academic roles including membership in the Graduate Faculty, Cooperating Graduate Faculty, and Affiliate Faculty. Her research focuses on generative approaches to language acquisition, particularly in second (L2) and third (L3) language contexts, emphasizing age-dependent effects, sentence processing mechanisms, and cross-linguistic influences.

Her work spans theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics, with notable contributions to understanding L2 comprehension challenges in relative clauses among Korean/Mandarin speakers and L3 Mandarin acquisition by Cantonese-English bilinguals. She has published extensively in venues like Second Language Research and Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development.

Key research themes include syntactic learnability, bilingual cognitive architecture, and the role of Universal Grammar in nonnative acquisition. Her collaborative projects with scholars like R.A. Sprouse explore foundational issues in generative approaches to multilingualism.