Annick De Houwer

Annick De Houwer is Director of the Harmonious Bilingualism Network (HaBilNet). HaBilNet aims to support and stimulate research into harmonious bilingualism and to widely disseminate the results of that research both within and outside of academia. Dr. De Houwer held professorial positions in Belgium and in Germany (most recently as Professor of Language Acquisition and Multilingualism) and research positions at the Belgian National Science Foundation and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. She has been affiliated with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and was a Visiting Scholar at several US universities.

Dr. De Houwer's research has mainly focused on morphosyntactic and lexical development in both bilingual and monolingual children, including standard-dialect variation and methodological issues. She has also addressed socio-psychological aspects of child language acquisition and the role of the input and greater environment. 

De Houwer is the author of The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth: A Case Study (1990); Bilingual First Language Acquisition (2009), An Introduction to Bilingual Development (2009), and Bilingual Development in Childhood (2021). She has published widely in journals and edited volumes. She was series editor of Trends in Language Acquisition Research (with Steven Gillis) and IMPACT: Studies of Language in Society and has co-edited several volumes, most recently The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism. She sits on the editorial board of several journals (including the Journal of Child Language) and book series.

Previous service to the International Association for the Study of Child Language includes terms as Treasurer, Co-Chair of the Publication Committee, and member of the Executive Committee.