Susan Moore Ervin-Tripp (1927–2018) was an American linguist whose psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research focused on the relation between language use and the development of linguistic forms, especially the developmental changes and structure of interpersonal talk among children.
[1][2] Born Susan Moore Ervin on June 29, 1927, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she earned her undergraduate degree in Art History at Vassar College.
She earned a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1955 for her thesis, entitled The Verbal Behaviour of Bilinguals: The Effect of Language of Report upon the Thematic Apperception Test Stories of Adult French Bilinguals, under the supervision of Theodore Newcomb.
[4] In her academic work she conducted research on child language acquisition and bilingualism among children and has made contributions to the fields of linguistics, psychology, child development, sociology, anthropology, rhetoric, and women's studies.
[8] A tribute to the work of Susan Ervin-Tripp with a comprehensive bibliography was published by A. Kyratzis in 2020.