Roberta Golinkoff, H. Rodney Sharp Chair in the School of Education, won the 2011 Francis Alison Award, the University's highest faculty honor. Named for the Rev. Francis Alison, who in 1743 founded the school to which UD traces its roots, the award is made to exceptional scholar-teachers and consists of a $10,000 prize and membership in the Alison Society.
Director of the Infant Language Project, Golinkoff developed a method to assess language comprehension in babies who do not yet speak. Her Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPLP) "tricks" babies to reveal their knowledge of language. Because of her research, it is now known that infants do not sit passively while words wash over them; instead they are actively analyzing what they hear and extracting language's rules and regularities.
Passionate about the importance of play in children's lives, Golinkoff argues that Americans underestimate the value of play and maintains that to ignore the role of playful learning in children's lives is to doom the next generation to follow orders rather than innovate, and to memorize rather than create.