Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D., is a Research Associate in Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics is from the University of Miami. She has over twenty years of research experience in the fields of language acquisition and bilingualism and did ground-breaking work on bilingual acquisition and assessment with her research group at the University of Miami. Those studies of bilingual infants and children have been published in the book Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children. Most recently, Barbara Zurer Pearson worked on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV), a project to develop an innovative language assessment for children funded by the National Institutes of Health.