Claire Foley brings a background in developmental linguistics to her work at the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children. She is the Associate Director of both the Center and of City Connects, a research-practice partnership that implements and studies an evidence-based way for schools to address the out-of-school factors that affect how children learn and thrive.In linguistics and language acquisition, her research investigates the way children acquire the grammar underlying complex sentences in different languages, with a particular interest in the theory and acquisition of clausal architecture and its relationship to embedded verbal inflectional systems. Drawing on her research experience in language development and cognitive science, she contributes to the theoretical, empirical, and practice-related work of City Connects and the Walsh Center for Thriving Children, seeking to advance the collaboration among researchers and practitioners.A Research Professor, she is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Formative Education, Lynch School of Education and Human Development. She is also a Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of Eastern, Slavic, and German Studies, Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences.
