Misha Becker

Dr. Misha Becker is a Professor and Chair in the Linguistics Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on syntactic theory, first language acquisition, bilingualism, and language revitalization. She has authored/co-authored influential textbooks such as *Language Acquisition and Development: A Generative Introduction* (MIT Press, 2020) and *The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure: Animacy and Thematic Alignment* (Cambridge, 2014). Her work explores how children acquire syntactic displacement structures, emotion adjectives, and abstract verbs through mechanisms involving animacy cues and linguistic context.

Her recent collaborations include projects with the New Kituwah Academy for Cherokee language revitalization and studies on Basque language attitudes in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. She teaches courses on language acquisition, bilingualism, and sociolinguistics. The UNC Language Development Lab, under her direction, investigates child language development through experimental methodologies.

Key research themes include: syntactic learnability puzzles, language revitalization strategies, and interdisciplinary approaches to emotion word acquisition. Her work bridges formal syntax theory with empirical child language data, often employing computational models and cross-linguistic comparisons.