Kira Gor

Kira Gor (Ph.D. in Linguistics and Experimental Phonetics, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, and Ph.D. in Russian and Second Language Acquisition, Bryn Mawr College) is Professor of Second Language Acquisition and Russian at the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland, where she teaches courses in the Graduate Program in Second Language Acquisition. Her research focuses on nonnative lexical access, the structure of the nonnative mental lexicon, cross-linguistic phonetic perception, the phonology-orthography interface, and phonological and morphological processing in heritage and late learners of Russian. Her articles appeared in Applied Psycholinguistics, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Frontiers in Psychology, Journal of Memory and Language, Journal of Slavic Linguistics, Language and Cognitive Processes, Language Learning, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Second Language Research, Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and The Mental Lexicon. Her publications include Interlanguage Phonology and Second Language Orthography: Vowel Reduction in the Interlanguage of American Learners of Russian (St. Petersburg University Press, 1998). She has co-authored two editions of a four-volume multimedia Russian language course, Russian Stage One: Live from Moscow! (1996), and Russian Stage One: Live from Russia! (2008). She is currently working on the project Linguistic Correlates of Proficiency at the Intermediate and Advanced Levels: Russian funded by the Department of Education through the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (CSEEES) at Duke University.

EDUCATION 

Ph.D. - Linguistics and Experimental Phonetics, Saint Petersburg State University
Ph.D. - Russian and Second Language Acquisition, Bryn Mawr College

TEACHING & RESEARCH INTERESTS

Second language acquisition and processing of phonology and morphology

Second language lexical access

The nonnative mental lexicon

Processing of inflectional morphology by native and non-native speakers

Linguistic correlates of second language proficiency

The heritage speaker
 

COURSES TAUGHT IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS

SLAA 611 Fundamentals of foreign language acquisition and instruction
SLAA 741 Cognitive processes in second language learning
SLAA 749F Second language acquisition and processing of phonology
SLAA 749L Phonology and morphology in L2 lexical access
SLAA 749V The L2 mental lexicon and issues in vocabulary learning
SLAA 772 Bilingualism and multilingualism
SLAA 773 The heritage speaker