Nina Semushina

I am a graduate student in Linguistics at UCSD, and work with professor Rachel Mayberry in the Laboratory of Multimodal Language Development. My specialization is Sign Language Linguistics and I currently work on numeral incorporation in Russian Sign Language which, being a moderately productive and highly constrained, but possibly universal sign language phenomenon, can give unique insights about morpho-phonology of sign languages and therefore must be studied crosslinguistically. It also a great material to study the acquisition of numeral morphology.
I am interested in the relationship between language and number and am passionate with the following questions. How linguistic is number and counting itself? Does the age of language acquisition influence the mathematical ability and understanding of number concept? How the acquisition of the numeral morphology influences the ability to count and vice versa? Is counting possible without language?