Welcome! Dr. Suzanne van der Feest is an Associate Research Professor at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. in the Ph.D. Program in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences with a secondary affiliation in the Linguistics Program. She leads the Child Language Lab, which is located on the 7th floor of The Graduate Center building.

Dr. van der Feest is from the Netherlands, where she got her PhD in Linguistics in 2007 from the Radboud University Nijmegen, conducting her research at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Her experiences working with Linguists, Psychologists, and Speech-Language Pathologists have given her a full appreciation for the complexity of the language development puzzle. 

Her main line of research focuses on young children’s language acquisition: How do children learn the relevant sounds of their native language(s) or dialect(s), and how do they use this knowledge to build a “phonological lexicon” – or in other words, a “mental dictionary” of what words should sound like? For more information about this and other research, please see the Child Language Lab website.

Dr. Van der Feest currently teaches Speech Science, Research Methods in Language Acquisition and Professional Issues.

From 2014-2018, she managed the Child Language Lab Austin at the Linguistics Department of the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught Child Language and Intro to Cognitive Science. She also taught and conducted research at the UT Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders (2009-2014) and taught at the Department of Psychology at Villanova University, PA (2008). She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology (IRCS) at the University of Pennsylvania (2006-2008).

Contact Dr. van der Feest (svanderfeest at gc dot cuny dot edu) if you are interested in getting involved with the Child Language Lab at the CUNY Graduate Center!