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Virginia Valian is an American psycholinguist, cognitive scientist, and theorist of male-female differences in professional achievement.
Valian is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College as well as a member of the doctoral faculties of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. She directs the Language Acquisition Research Center (LARC) and the Gender Equity Project (GEP), both at Hunter College. For her work on gender equity, Valian received the 2006 Betty Vetter Award for Research from WEPAN (Women in Engineering ProActive Network). She became an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
Valian uses a variety of methods – corpus analysis, sentence imitation, pointing tasks, and priming. She has investigated young children's knowledge of abstract syntactic categories and features (such as determiners like 'a' and 'the', adjectives, nouns, prepositions, and the phrases containing those categories, and tense)
and young children's understanding that their language does (as in English) or does not (as in Italian and Chinese) require subjects.
She argues that apparent deficits in children's knowledge instead reflect limitations in executive function.
Valian also works on the relation between bilingualism and higher cognitive function (executive function), where she has proposed that any positive benefits of bilingualism compete with the benefits of other cognitively challenging activities.
In 2014, the Chronicle of Higher Education queried 12 scholars about what nonfiction book published in the last 30 years had most changed their minds. Valian's book was one of the 12 described.
In 2018 Abigail Stewart and Valian co-authored An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence, MIT Press.
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