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Kutas received a B.A. in 1971 from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. in 1977 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego in 1980. She then accepted a position as a research neuroscientist in the Department of Neurosciences at UCSD, ... |
Thomas G. Bever (born December 9, 1939) is a Regent's Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience at the University of Arizona. He has been a leading figure in psycholinguistics, focusing on the cognitive and neurological bases of linguistic universals, among other pursuits. Bever received... |
Bever is notable for his study of garden path sentences such as "The horse raced past the barn fell", as well as his analysis by synthesis model of sentence processing, developed with David Townsend. In recent decades, Bever has studied the differences in language processing between righthanders with familial handednes... |
He was a co-founder of the journal "Cognition". |
Petitto's research and discoveries span several scientific disciplines. Her early work with Nim Chimpsky and her later work with humans, encompasses anthropology, comparative ethology, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science, theoretical linguistics, philosophy, psychology, psycholinguistics, la... |
Advancement of New Discipline: Petitto had an early role in the creation of a new scientific discipline with her colleague and husband Kevin Niall Dunbar, which they termed Educational Neuroscience. Educational Neuroscience is a sister discipline of Cognitive Neuroscience, in which basic neuroscience and behavioral sci... |
Taken together, Petitto's research discoveries and scientific writings have offered testable hypotheses and theory regarding the neural basis for the brain's specialization for human language, the types of language features a child must minimally be exposed to (and when) in early life (sensitive or critical periods), w... |
After her undergraduate work with Nim Chimpsky, Petitto went on to make discoveries about the linguistic structure, acquisition, and representation in the brain of the world's natural signed languages, especially American Sign Language (ASL). Using signed languages as a new "microscope" to discover the central/universa... |
Petitto's more recent studies involve the use of a combination of four disciplines: |
Petitto is the recipient of over twenty international prizes and awards including, |
Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University. |
Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". His "pioneering research on the origins of social cogniti... |
Tomasello was born in Bartow, Florida. He received his bachelor's degree 1972 from Duke University and his doctorate in Experimental Psychology 1980 from University of Georgia. |
He was a professor of psychology and anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, during the 1980s and 1990s. Subsequently, he moved to Germany to become co-director of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and later also honorary professor at University of Leipzig and co-director ... |
He works on child language acquisition as a crucially important aspect of the enculturation process. He is a critic of Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, rejecting the idea of an innate universal grammar and instead proposing a functional theory of language development (sometimes called the social-pragmatic theory of la... |
Tomasello also studies broader cognitive skills in a comparative light at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig. With his research team, he created a set of experimental devices to test toddlers' (from 6 months to 24 months) and apes' spatial, instrumental, and social cognition; the outcome of which is... |
Uniqueness of human social cognition: broad outlines. |
More specifically, Tomasello argues that apes lack a series of skills: |
Tomasello sees these skills as being preceded and encompassed by the capacity to share attention and intention (collective intentionality), an evolutionary novelty that would have emerged as a cooperative integrating of apes skills that formerly worked in competition. |
The sharing of attention and of intention. |
Tomasello's defense, use and deepening of the shared attention and intention hypothesis rely on the experimental data asserted to above (see also). Tomasello also resorts to an evolutionary two-step scenario (see below), and to philosophical concepts borrowed from Paul Grice, John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Michael Brat... |
For Tomasello, this two-step evolutionary path of macro ecological pressures impacting micro-level skills in representation, inferences and self-monitoring, does not hold because natural selection would see internal mechanisms. "Cognitive processes are a product of natural selection, but they are not its target. Indeed... |
Echoing the phylogenetic path, humans' unique skills at joint and collective intentionality develop during the individual's lifetime by scaffolding, not only on simple skills like distinguishing animate/inanimate matter, but also on the communicative conventions and institutions forming the socio-cultural environment, ... |
The sharing of attention and of intention is taken to be prior to language in evolutionary time and in an individual's lifetime, while conditioning language's acquisition through the parsing of joint attentional scenes into actors, objects, events and the like. More broadly, Tomasello sees the sharing of attention and ... |
Willem Johannes Maria (Pim) Levelt (born 17 May 1938 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch psycholinguist. He is an influential researcher of human language acquisition and speech production. He developed a comprehensive theory of the cognitive processes involved in the act of speaking, including the significance of the "mental lex... |
Levelt became a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 1993. In 2000 he became a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. Levelt became a corresponding member (living abroad) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2002. In 2010 Levelt was awarded the "Orden Po... |
Dan Isaac Slobin (born May 7, 1939) is a Professor Emeritus of psychology and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Slobin has made major contributions to the study of children's language acquisition, and his work has demonstrated the importance of cross-linguistic comparison for the study of language ... |
Slobin received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1960 and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University in 1964. In addition to working at the University of California, Berkeley, Slobin has served as a visiting professor at several universities around the world, including Boğaziçi Universi... |
Slobin has extensively studied the organization of information about spatial relations and motion events by speakers of different languages, including both children and adults. He has argued that becoming a competent speaker of a language requires learning certain language-specific modes of thinking, which he dubbed "t... |
Slobin did a research study, published in 2007, titled the "Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections." The aim of the study was to show that we must not generalize that the acquiring of English language in children is the same as the acquiring of "x" languages. Slob... |
Slobin believes that language is acquired and is a learning as well as cognitive development in a child. His choice of method is the result of his theoretical stance where, in task-comparison activity, his subjects get exposed to a consistent variety of tests, administered differently over a period of ten days. In task... |
Slobin also designed a project, along with Ruth Berman in the beginning of 1980. He created "The frog-story project", a research tool which was a children's storybook that tells a story in 24 pictures with no words. This makes it possible to elicit narratives that are comparable in content but differing in form, across... |
His project was also mentioned in Raphael Berthele, a professor in the University of Fribourg, Switzerland on her work in the "Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology approach" by Elena Lieven, Jiansheng Guo. |
Elizabeth Ann Bates (July 26, 1947 – December 13, 2003) was a Professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. She was an internationally renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, aphasia, and the neurological bases of language, and she authored 1... |
Elizabeth Bates earned a B.A. from St. Louis University in 1968, and an M.A. and PhD in human development from the University of Chicago in 1971 and 1974, respectively. |
She was employed as a tenure-track professor at the University of Colorado from 1974-1981 before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, where she worked until late 2003. Bates was one of the founders of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD, the first department of its kind in the USA. Sh... |
On December 13, 2003, Elizabeth Bates died, after a year-long struggle with pancreatic cancer. Over the course of more than thirty years, Bates had established herself as a world leader in a number of fields – child development, language acquisition, aphasia research, cross-linguistic research, bilingualism, psycholing... |
In defense of communication functioning as a main force of language acquisition, she looked to the prelinguistic use of commands by infants that required them to develop and use social skills. She highlighted the reliance on pointing by infants in order to fill their need to communicate before they are able to speak. T... |
Domain-Specificity, Modularity and Neural Plasticity in Language Processing. |
Bates and colleagues also showed that after brain injury, adult aphasic patients' deficits were not specific to linguistic structures theorized to be localized to specific brain areas, or even restricted to the linguistic domain. Deficits and lesion sites instead overlap in the role that they affect speech fluency and ... |
David Swinney (April 21, 1946 – April 14, 2006) was a prominent psycholinguist. His research on language comprehension contributed to methodological advances in his field. |
Swinney received his BA in Psychology at Indiana University in 1968, his MA in Language Disorders, Speech Pathology and Audiology (1969), and his PhD in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin (1974). |
Swinney's faculty positions included: Tufts University (Department of Psychology), Rutgers University (Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Departments), the City University of New York (Programs in Linguistics, Psychology, Speech and Hearing Science) and University of California, San Diego (Chair, Department of Psycholog... |
Cross-Modal Priming Task. The Cross-Modal Priming Task (CMPT), developed by David Swinney, is an online measure used to detect activation of lexical and syntactic information during sentence comprehension. |
Prior to Swinney's introduction of this methodology, studies of lexical access were largely procured by offline measures, such as a phoneme-monitoring task. In these measures, study participants were asked to respond to a syntactic or lexical ambiguity in a sentence only after the entire sentence had been comprehended.... |
During this task, study participants heard recorded sentences containing lexical or syntactic ambiguities while seated in front of a computer screen. At the same moment when the ambiguous word or phrase was uttered, simultaneously a string of letters---either a word or a non-word---was flashed on the computer screen, a... |
The uttered words had an ambiguous meaning or were an ambiguous phrase (for example: "mouse" - which could be understood as an animal or as a computer input device). |
The words shown on the screen - when they were actual lexical words (and not non-words), could be related to one of the meanings of the uttered word or phrase (for example, on the screen the written word could be "animal", or "computer"), or the written word on the screen could be a control word or phrase, unrelated to... |
Study participants were then asked to respond as quickly as possible once the probes were processed (i.e. once they understood them). The test assumed that multiple meanings are activated at the moment an ambiguity is encountered in a sentence, which primes related concepts. Swinney's anticipated quicker recognition of... |
This study utilized a CMPT, in order to investigate the process by which people resolve lexical ambiguity. Specifically, do people access all meanings of words at such moments, or only one meaning? Subjects listened to pre-recorded series of sentences that contained ambiguous words. These words were equibiased—meaning ... |
For example, subjects were presented with the utterance: "Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several bugs in the corner of the room." Here, the word "bugs" was determined to be ambiguous and equibiased towards the meaning of eith... |
Additionally, context conditions varied in that some had no biasing context, as above, or they strongly biased the listener towards one meaning or another. For example, "Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches... |
Swinney claimed that if a person activates both meanings of an equibiased ambiguous word simultaneously, then the response times should be the same regardless of which meaning is primed by the stimulus. However, if one meaning or another is activated, then the response time should be quicker for the priming of that mea... |
Results indicated that listeners accessed multiple meanings for ambiguous words, even when faced with strong biasing contexts that indicated a single meaning. That is to say that regardless of whether "the man was not surprised when he found several bugs in the corner of the room" or "the man was not surprised when he ... |
In this study, Love, Maas and Swinney explored lexical access, using the CMPT, among three different categories of English proficient individuals: monolingual native English speakers (NINES), non-native English speakers (NNES) and bilingual native English speakers (BNES). Particularly, they were interested in how these... |
"The professor insisted that the exam be completed in ink, so Jimmy used the new pen (Probe Position1), that his mother-in-law recently (Probe Position2) purchased (Probe Position3) because the multiple colors allowed for more creativity." |
This object-relative construction is considered non-canonical because the direct object "pen" occurs before its associated verb "purchased". Thus, it can be considered a "fronted direct object". The argument relies on the ambiguity of the word, "pen" which could mean either a writing instrument, or a jail cell. The Pro... |
After qualifying language pre-tests and completion of a self-report questionnaire about language proficiency, background, and age of second language acquisition, subjects were classified as either BNES or NNES. The non-English languages identified were of wide variety (e.g. Russian, Cantonese, Greek, Mandarin, Vietname... |
Overall, all the English-proficient individuals tested activated both meanings of the ambiguous direct object as soon as it was presented, despite the strong biasing context. Then, in the NINES group, activation had dissipated 700 ms downstream (PP2), until the primary meaning was reactivated at Probe Position 3, after... |
In this experiment, Zurif, Swinney and Garret built upon existing research on language processing errors in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia patients. Prior studies indicate that, generally, Broca's aphasia patients demonstrate a slower-than-normal time course of lexical activation than controls; whereas, lexical activat... |
"The gymnast loved the professor* from the northern city who* (t)* complained about the bad coffee." |
Since the displaced "who" is intended to modify "the professor" in this sentence, reactivation of antecedent "the professor" at "who" refers to the process of gap filling. Here, the gap between the subject noun phrase and relative pronoun is necessarily resolved through mental reordering of the sentence's structural el... |
Findings indicated that, in support of the hypothesis, the capacity and resources available to patients with Wernicke's aphasia to procure appropriate gap filling remain intact. Although this process appears to be preserved, the researchers point out that other related processes, such as higher-level sentence comprehen... |
On the other hand, the gap filling process in Broca's patients was significantly impaired. Results showed that priming was not activated at any of the probe positions—signifying a poverty of resources available to these patients for real-time processing such subject-relative constructions. The researchers argue, based ... |
Jeffrey Locke Elman (January 22, 1948 – June 28, 2018) was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He specialized in the field of neural networks. |
In 1990, he introduced the simple recurrent neural network (SRNN), also known as the 'Elman network', which is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli, and has since become widely used. |
Elman's work was highly significant to our understanding of how languages are acquired and also, once acquired, how sentences are comprehended. Sentences in natural languages are composed of sequences of words that are organized in phrases and hierarchical structures. The Elman network provides an important hypothesis ... |
Elman was also a generous and kind person, beloved by his colleagues at UCSD and around the world. |
Elman attended Palisades High School in Pacific Palisades, California, then Harvard University, where he graduated in 1969. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977. |
With Jay McClelland, Elman developed the TRACE model of speech perception in the mid-80s. TRACE remains a highly influential model that has stimulated a large body of empirical research. |
In 1990, he introduced the simple recurrent neural network (SRNN; aka 'Elman network'), which is a widely used recurrent neural network that is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli. Elman nets are used in a number of fields, including cognitive science, psychology, economics and physics, among many others... |
In 1996, he co-authored (with Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett), the book "Rethinking Innateness", which argues against a strong nativist (innate) view of development. |
Elman was an Inaugural Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, and also was its President, from 1999-2000. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the New Bulgarian University, and was the 2007 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science. He was founding Co-Director o... |
Suzy J. Styles is a psychologist with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Her research is in the area of psycholinguistics and cognitive approaches to language acquisition. She is the director of the Brain, Language and Intersensory Perception Lab at NTU. |
In 2017 she and Nora Turoman published a paper in "Royal Society Open Science" that found that research subjects could guess the sounds represented by letters from unfamiliar alphabets better than would be expected from simple chance indicating the possibility of an innate ability to understand writing. |
Li is also President-Elect of the "Society for Computers in Psychology" and one of the four chief editors of ", Cambridge University Press". |
Linda B. Smith is a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. Smith earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. |
Smith is the author (or co-author) of more than 100 publications on cognitive and linguistic development in young children. |
With Esther Thelen, she co-authored the books "A Dynamic Systems Approach to Development" (Smith & Thelen 1993) and "A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action" (Thelen & Smith 1994), which look at development from a dynamic systems perspective. |
She is also well known for her research on the shape bias (Landau et al. 1988), children's tendency to generalize new concrete nouns on the basis of the shape of the object to which they refer. |
In 1997, she received the Tracy Sonneborn Award, Indiana University's highest award to its faculty. In 2007, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013 she received the Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. In 2019, she received the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award fro... |
Janet Dean Fodor (born 1942) is distinguished professor of linguistics at the City University of New York. Her primary field is psycholinguistics, and her research interests include human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition. |
Born Janet Dean, she grew up in England and received her B.A. in 1964 and her M.A. in 1966, both from Oxford University. At Oxford she was a student of the social psychologist Michael Argyle, and their 'equilibrium hypothesis' for nonverbal communication became the basis for affiliative conflict theory: if participants... |
In 1988, Fodor founded the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992. She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997. In 2014, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. A volume of papers in her honor, "Explicit and Implicit Prosod... |
Fodor supervised 27 dissertations of students from both CUNY and the University of Connecticut. In 2017, she received an honorary doctorate from the Paris Diderot University. |
She was married to Jerry Alan Fodor until his death in 2017. |
Fodor and Lyn Frazier proposed a new two-stage model of parsing human sentences and the syntactic analysis of these sentences. The first step of this new model is to “assign lexical and phrasal nodes to groups of words within the lexical string that is received”. The second step is to add higher nonterminal nodes and c... |
Through a series of sentence analyses, Fodor found that the “WH-trace appears in mental representations of sentence structure, but NP-trace does not”. WH-trace is the placement of interrogative words (who, what, where) in a sentence. Her findings did not support those of McElree, Bever, or MacDonald, but she acknowledg... |
In this article, Fodor emphasizes the importance of integrating prosody into research on sentence processing. She argues that past research has focused on syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences, but people use prosody when reading, which affects reading comprehension and sentence analysis. She also brings up the ... |
Building off of the work of her doctoral advisor, Noam Chomsky, Fodor wrote an article on the importance of identifying empty categories in sentence processing. Empty categories can “account for certain regularities of sentence structure”, and attaching it with a previous word or phrase can help determine what it means... |
Colin Phillips is a British psycholinguist who is the director of the Maryland Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. He is an elected fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a co-editor of the "Annual Review of Linguistics". |
Colin Phillips grew up in a rural town in eastern England. He attended Oxford University, where he studied Medieval German literature. He then came to the United States on an exchange scholarship to study at Rochester University for a year, where he became more interested in linguistics. He then attended graduate schoo... |
Philipps researches language acquisition and language processing. In 1997 he was hired at the University of Delaware as an assistant professor. In 2000 he accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was promoted to associate professor in 2002 and full professor in 2008.... |
He has been co-editor of the "Annual Review of Linguistics" with Mark Y. Liberman since 2021. |
The Linguistic Society of America elected him as a fellow in 2018. |
In 2020 he was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. |
During his study-abroad year at Rochester University he met his future wife, Andrea Zukowski. They have one child. In 2016 he and Zukowski founded College Park parkrun, a series of free running events in their area. |
Helen J. Neville (May 20, 1946 – October 12, 2018) was a Canadian psychologist and neuroscientist known internationally for her research in the field of human brain development. |
Neville received a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, an M.A. from Simon Fraser University, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. She has been employed as Director of the Laboratory for Neuropsychology... |
Neville was the Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Director of the Brain Development Lab, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. |
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