Lidz received his PhD from the
University of Delaware in 1996 and held postdoctoral fellowships at the
University of Pennsylvania and
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique from 1997 to 2000 and in 1998, respectively. As a postdoc at UPenn, he studied
Kannada, finding that despite its
causative morpheme, two-year-olds
acquiring Kannada rely on number of overt
NPs when making judgements about novel word meanings. He worked as an assistant professor at
Northwestern University from 2000 to 2005 before moving to the University of Maryland. Lidz was named a Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in 2015. Much of Lidz's research focuses on the syntactic details of child language acquisition. His findings show evidence of significant syntactic development in 18-month-olds, including understandings of long-range dependency and parts of speech. Articles by Lidz arguing for the necessity of
Chomsky's theory of
Universal Grammar have appeared in
Scientific American and
The Conversation. Lidz was the editor-in-chief for
Language Acquisition from 2013 to 2020 and edited/co-authored the
Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics. ==References==