Julien Musolino

Title: Associate Professor
Areas : Cognitive Psychology/Psycholinguistics
Phone: 732-445-4061
Email: julienm@ruccs.rutgers.edu
Campus: Busch
Building: Psych A111

I am originally from France and I completed my undergraduate education in Europe (Switzerland and the UK). I received my Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Maryland in 1998 and spent three years at the University of Pennsylvania where I held a postdoctoral appointment in the area of Cognitive/Developmental psychology. From 2001 to 2007, I was an Assistant and then an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University (with an adjunct appointment in Linguistics). I joined Rutgers in 2007 where I hold a dual appointment in Psychology and at the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS).

My area of specialization is psycholinguistics and my research focuses on language acquisition and language processing. This work, based on my training in theoretical linguistics (Ph.D.), cognitive/developmental psychology (post-doc) and speech-language pathology (former faculty position), takes an interdisciplinary approach and integrates concepts, methods, and experimental techniques from these three different fields. The long term goal of this work is to understand how language is represented, acquired and processed by children. On a general level, my work aims to show that when integrated, the formal, developmental, and pathological perspectives can constrain and enrich each other in ways that will lead to a deeper level of understanding.

Specifically, my research (a) demonstrates that linguistic theory, in addition to providing a rigorous theoretical framework, can be used to explain developmental patterns and formulate precise developmental questions; (b) illustrates how the tools of developmental psychology can be used to address these questions experimentally; (c) shows how the results from these experimental investigations, in turn, can illuminate core theoretical issues; and (d) underscores the fact that the study of typical and atypical development must proceed hand in hand, with each area informing the other (see my recent work with Barbara Landau on Williams Syndrome). Below are some recent papers which illustrate the approach described above.

Musolino, J. (2006) ‘On the Semantics of the Subset Principle’. Language Learning and Development, 2(3), 195-218.

Musolino, J. (2004) ‘The semantics and acquisition of number words: integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives’, Cognition 93(1), 1-41.

Musolino, J. and Lidz, J. (2006) ‘Why Children aren’t universally successful with Quantification’ Linguistics, 44(4), 817-852.

Han, C.H., Lidz, J. and Musolino, J. (2007) ‘Verb-raising and Grammar Competition in Korean: Evidence from Negation and Quantifier Scope’. Linguistic Inquiry, 38(1), 1-47.

Lidz, J. and Musolino, J. (2002) 'Children's Command of Quantification', Cognition 84(2), 113-154.

Papafragou, A. and Musolino, J. (2003) ‘Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface’ Cognition, 86(3), 253-282.