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Neville died on October 12, 2018 at the age of 72.
Neville studied in cerebral specialization, neuroplasticity of the brain in childhood and adulthood, the roles of biological constraints and experience, and neurolinguistics. In order to investigate these topics, Neville used a variety of methods, including behavioral measures, event-related potentials (ERPs), and structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Neville's research has helped to distinguish between the brain systems and functions that are largely fixed from those which are modifiable by experience, and with all her work she aimed to make a positive, tangible difference in society. She was involved in a number of outreach programs and charities in addition to scientific research.
Neville has been published extensively, in journals including "Nature", "Nature Neuroscience", "Journal of Neuroscience", "Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience", "Cerebral Cortex" and "Brain Research".
Recent topics of research she has been involved in include the neural mechanisms of grammar acquisition in adults, attentional control mechanisms as they relate to working memory, as well as various types of attention and learning mechanisms in young children.
Neville and the Brain Development Lab were also responsible for creating "Changing Brains", a program of video segments aimed at non-scientists to describe what research has revealed the effects of experience on human brain development. The series aims to inform parents, teachers and policymakers on how to help children develop to their full potential. Neurologist Oliver Sacks said the program was "...fascinating and very original in form and presentation — and exactly the way to present (brain) science to non-scientists."
She is the author of the book "Temperament tools: working with your child's inborn traits" (1998)
Neville has won grants from the U.S. Department of Education and National Institutes of Health for her work in neurocognitive development. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Society and Society of Experimental Psychologists. In 2013, she received the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science. Other awards that she received for her work in psychology are listed below:
Ursula Bellugi (born February 21, 1931 in Jena, Germany) is a Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. She is also adjunct professor at the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University and an Associate with the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology. Broadly stated, she conducts research on the biological bases of language. More specifically, she has studied the neurological bases of American Sign Language extensively, and her work has led to the discovery that the left hemisphere of the human brain becomes specialized for language, whether spoken or signed, a striking demonstration of neuronal plasticity.
She has also investigated the language abilities of individuals with Williams Syndrome, a puzzling genetically based disorder that leaves language, facial recognition and social skills remarkably well-preserved in contrast to severe inadequacy in other cognitive aptitudes. The search for the underlying biological basis for this disorder is providing new opportunities for understanding how brain structure and function relate to cognitive capabilities.
Bellugi received a B.A. from Antioch College in 1952 and an Ed.D. from Harvard University in 1967. Since then, she has held positions as a tenure-track professor at the Salk Institute (1970 forward) and as an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego (1977 forward) and San Diego State University (1995 forward).
Bellugi is the daughter of mathematician and optical engineer Maximilian Herzberger. A lot of her research was conducted in collaboration with her husband Edward Klima, a linguist who also specialized in the study of American Sign Language.
Martin Dimond Stewart Braine (June 3, 1926 – April 6, 1996) was a cognitive psychologist known for his research on the development of language and reasoning. He was Professor of Psychology at New York University at the time of his death.
Braine was well known for his research on mental logic."" He theorized that people naturally make deductive inferences based on their knowledge of natural language terms like "if," "all", "any", and "not." Such terms are understood through an intuitive logic that supports commonsense reasoning, but may also produce reasoning fallacies or errors. This natural mental logic was viewed as distinct from the standard logic of mathematicians and philosophers in terms of the inferences it licensed. In contrast to Philip Johnson-Laird and others who suggested that people rely on mental models as opposed to logic when reasoning, Braine took the position that people rely on both mental logic and mental models, with the former closely tied to processes of linguistic comprehension.
Braine edited the volumes "Categories and Processes in Language Acquisition" by Yonata Levy and Izchak Schlesinger, and "Mental Logic" with David O'Brien.
Braine was born in Kuala Lumpur on June 3, 1926. He was the son of Edith Braine, a teacher, and Charles Dimond Conway Braine, a civil engineer. His younger brother was the British philosopher David Dimond Conway Braine.
Braine received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering in 1946 at University of Birmingham in England. He subsequently attended the University of London where he received a B.S. in Psychology. In London he attended lectures by Jean Piaget, which influenced his later research on the development of logical reasoning.
Braine continued his education at New York University where he received his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1957 under the supervision of Elsa Robinson. Braine worked at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and later at Walker Reed Army Medical Center as a researcher before joining the faculty of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965. Braine moved to New York University in 1971 where he remained for the duration of his career.
Braine married Lila (Rosensveig) Ghent in 1960. Lila Braine was a Professor of Psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. They had a son Jonathan in 1961 and a daughter Naomi in 1964. Braine died of cancer in New York City on April 6, 1996.
Braine conducted research on child language development and engaged in the empiricism-nativism debate. Prior to Noam Chomsky's arguments for innate linguistic universals, there was a strong belief that the structures of language were learned from the input. Braine offered a compromise position that language acquisition was a process of mapping utterances onto a syntax of thought, supported by semantic primitives and a mental logic.
Braine proposed that when learning language, young children use "limited scope" formula to produce their first word combinations, with each formula consisting of a relational term with a slot to be filled (e.g. "all gone ____"). Braine's view that toddlers learn the combinatorial properties of words on an item-by-item basis paved the way for usage-based, lexicalist approaches to grammatical development. Other work focused on learners' acquisition of grammatical gender categories and their reliance on probabilistic cues to acquire grammatical structure. Braine's research emphasized how linguistic patterns are discovered and strengthened through use and repetition.
Duane Girard Watson (born 1976) is an American neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. He holds the Frank W. Mayborn Chair in Cognitive Science and leads the Vanderbilt University Communication and Language Laboratory.
Watson is from Las Vegas. Watson studied psychology at Princeton University. He originally intended to be a physician, but a class on linguistics made him change course. He graduated in 1998 and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here he joined the laboratory of Ted Gibson in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2002 Watson earned his doctoral degree. His research considered intonational phrasing (that is, sections of spoken text with a particular intonation patterns) in language comprehension. Watson was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rochester, where he worked with Michael Tanenhaus.
In 2016 Watson joined Vanderbilt University, where he leads the Communication and Language Laboratory (CaLL). CaLL investigate prosody, the patterns and rhythm of spoken word, individual differences in language processing and how language is produced.
Watson was appointed Director of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society in 2019. He serves as Associate Editor of the . Watson founded the SPARK society, an organisation that looks to support scientists of colour to become innovators in cognitive science. He was promoted to Frank W. Mayborn Chair in 2020.
Elena Lieven (born 18 August 1947) is a British psychology and linguistics researcher and educator. She was a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology in Leipzig, Germany. She is also a professor in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Manchester where she is Director of its Child Study Centre and leads the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD).
Elena Lieven is the sister of Anatol Lieven, Dominic Lieven, Michael Lieven, and Nathalie Lieven. Ancestors include Dorothea von Lieven and
Christoph von Lieven, prominent members of Baltic German nobility.
Lieven attended More House School in London, graduating in 1963, then studying at City of Westminster College in London. She studied experimental psychology during her undergraduate years at New Hall, Cambridge University, earning honors, and then studied language development during her doctoral studies at Cambridge.
After Cambridge, Lieven moved to the University of Manchester.
She was Editor of the "Journal of Child Language" for nearly ten years (1996–2005).
Her principal areas of research involve: usage-based approaches to language development; the emergence and construction of grammar; the relationship between input characteristics and the process of language development; and variation in children's communicative environments. She has been involved in the design and collection of naturalistic child language corpora initially funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and, more recently, has collected a number of dense databases funded by the Max Planck Institute.
Lieven was previously the president of the International Association for the Study of Child Language. Also, she is a member of The Chintang and Puma Documentation Project, a DOBES project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation aiming at the linguistic and ethnographic description of two endangered Sino-Tibetan languages of Nepal.
She has also been the director of the Child Study Centre; Centre lead for the Centre for Developmental Science and Disorders in the Institute of Brain, Behaviour and Mental Health; Director of the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD) which was established jointly by the University of Manchester, University of Liverpool and University of Lancaster in 2014 on a five-year grant.
She has been designated an honorary professor at the University of Leipzig, and she has been a guest researcher at numerous universities, including the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; University of Barcelona, University of California, Berkeley, US; and La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia]].
In July 2018 Lieven was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).
Susan E. Carey (born 1942) is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition and children's development of concepts and is known for introducing the concept of fast mapping, whereby children learn the meanings of words after a single exposure. Her research focuses on analyzing philosophical concepts, and conceptual changes in science over time. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates.
Carey was born in 1942 to William and Mary Carey. She received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1964, a Fulbright scholarship to study in University of London in 1965, and her PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard University in 1971.
She was employed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1972 to 1996 in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She was an assistant professor from 1972-1977, an associate professor from 1977 to 1984, and a full professor from 1984 to 1996. She was a professor at New York University in the department of psychology from 1996 to 2001. In 2001 she joined the faculty at Harvard University.
Susan Carey and Elsa Bartlett coined the term "fast mapping" in 1978. This term refers to the hypothesized mental process where a new concept is learned based only on a single exposure. In 1985 Carey wrote "Conceptual Change in Childhood", a book about the cognitive differences between children and adults. It is a case study about children's acquisition of biological knowledge and analyzes the ways the knowledge is restructured during development. The book reconciles Jean Piaget's work on animism with later work on children's knowledge of biological concepts.
On returning to Harvard, Carey began working alongside Elizabeth Spelke, and they started the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Carey also studied alongside George Miller, Jerome Butler, and Roger Brown. She conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Carey coined the term "Quinian bootstrapping", a theory that people build complex concepts out of simple ones.
In 2009 Carey wrote "The Origin of Concepts", which shows the basis of development of cognitive science. The book won the 2010 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award of the American Psychological Association.
Carey has served on editorial boards for the Psychological Review, Psychological Science, Journal of Acquisition, and Development Psychology.
Carey is married to the professor of philosophy Ned Block (NYU).
Carey received the Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind in 1998. In 2009 she was the first woman to receive the David E. Rumelhart Prize for significant contributions to the theoretical foundation of human cognition.
Carey is a member of the American Philosophical Society, National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine, and the British Academy.
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. She is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Susan Carey has received the following fellowships: Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1976-1978), Sloan Fellow (1980-1981), Institute for Advanced Studies fellow in the Behavioral Sciences (1984-1985), Cattell Fellowship (1995-1996), George A Miller Lecturer for the Society of Cognitive Neuroscience,(1998), Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), National Academy of Education (1999), Society for Experimental Psychology (1999), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), William James Fellow Award, American Psychology Society (2002); The British Academy Corresponding Fellow (2007), Ottawa Township High School Hall of Fame (2009), Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association (2009), and Cognitive Development Society Book Award (2001)
Frank Smith (1928-2020) was a Canadian psycholinguist recognized for his contributions in linguistics and cognitive psychology. He was an essential contributor to research on the nature of the reading process together with researchers such as George Armitage Miller, Kenneth S. Goodman, Paul A. Kolers, Jane W. Torrey, Jane Mackworth, Richard Venezky, Robert Calfee, and Julian Hochberg. Smith and Goodman are founders of whole language approach for reading instruction. He was the author of numerous books.
Frank Smith was born in England in 1928 and lived on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. He started out as reporter and editor for several media publications in Europe and Australia before commencing undergraduate studies at the University of Western Australia. He received a PhD in Psycholinguistics from Harvard University in 1967.
Smith held positions as professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education for twelve years, professor of Language in Education at the University of Victoria, British Columbia as well as professor and department-head of Applied English Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Before taking the position at the Ontario Institute, Smith briefly worked at the Southwest Regional Laboratory in Los Alamitos, California.
He died on December 29, 2020 in Victoria, B.C.
Smith's research made important contributions to the development of reading theory. His book "Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read" is regarded as a fundamental text in the development of the now discredited whole language movement. Amongst others, Smith's research and writings in psycholinguistics inspired cognitive psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West's research into the role of context in reading.
Smith's work, in particular "Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read", is a synthesis of psycholinguistic and cognitive psychology research applied to reading. Working from diverse perspectives, Frank Smith and Kenneth S. Goodman developed the theory of a unified single reading process that comprises an interaction between reader, text and language. On the whole, Smith's writing challenges conventional teaching and diverts from popular assumptions about reading.
Apart from his research in language, his research interests included the psychological, social and cultural consequences of human technology.
Smith advocated the concept that "children learn to read by reading". In 1975 he participated in a television documentary filmed by Stephen Rose for the BBC "Horizon" TV series while based at the Toronto Institute for Studies in Education. The programme focused on his work with a single -year-old child called Matthew.
He was against the 1970s idea that children should first learn the letters and letter combinations that convey the English language's forty-four sounds (Clymer's 45 phonic generalizations) and then they can read whole words by decoding them from their component phonemes. This "sounding out" words is a phonics, rather than a whole language, technique which is rooted in intellectual independence. The whole-language theory explained reading as a "language experience," where the reader interacts with the text/content and this in turn facilitates the link - "knowledge" - between the text and meaning. The emphasis is on the process or comprehension of the text.
Lise Menn (née Lise J. Waldman, born December 28, 1941, in Philadelphia) is an American linguist who specializes in psycholinguistics, including the study of language acquisition and aphasia. She is currently Professor Emerita of linguistics and was a fellow of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Boulder, Colorado until her retirement in 2007.
Menn earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1962 from Swarthmore College and a master's degree (also in mathematics) from Brandeis University in 1964. After changing fields, she earned a master's and doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975–6.
She taught or conducted research at several universities in the Boston area, including a post-doctoral position at MIT under Paula Menyuk and Kenneth N. Stevens, several years as a research associate with Jean Berko Gleason, and six years at the Aphasia Research Center of the Boston University School of Medicine under Harold Goodglass. She also spent a post-doctoral year with Eran Zaidel at UCLA, before being appointed associate professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado in 1986. Her approaches to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics are considered to be 'bottom-up' (i.e. data-driven), empiricist, and functionalist.
She has been a member of the governing committees of the Academy of Aphasia, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006, she was honored as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.
, Dr. Menn has written or edited nine books, and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. Her doctoral advisees and co-advisees include Marjorie Perlman Lorch, Rebecca Burns-Hoffmann, Kevin Markey, Andrea Feldman, Patrick Juola, Harold Wilcox, Debra Biasca, Valerie Wallace, Carolyn J. Buck-Gengler, and Holly Krech Thomas.
Dr. Menn was married to William Bright from 1986 until his death in 2006. Her first husband was Michael D. Menn; they were divorced in 1972. She is the mother of Stephen Menn and Joseph Menn and stepmother of Susie Bright.
Winfred Philip Lehmann (June 23, 1916August 1, 2007) was an American linguist who specialized in historical, Germanic, and Indo-European linguistics. He was for many years a professor and head of departments for linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association. Lehmann was also a pioneer in machine translation. He lectured a large number of future scholars at Austin, and was the author of several influential works on linguistics.
Winfred P. Lehmann was born in Surprise, Nebraska on June 23, 1916, the son of the Lutheran minister Philipp Ludwig Lehmann and Elenore Friederike Grosnick. The family was German American and spoke German at home. They moved to Wisconsin while Lehmann was a boy.
After graduating from high school, Lehmann studied German and classical philology at Northwestern College, where he received his BA in humanities in 1936. He subsequently enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. At Wisconsin, Lehmann specialized in phonetics and Indo-European and Germanic philology. He studied a variety of topics, including the works of John Milton and Homer, German literature, and became proficient in a diverse number of languages, including Old Church Slavonic, Lithuanian, Old Irish, Sanskrit and Old Persian. His command of languages would eventually extend to Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, and several branches of the Indo-European languages, including Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Hellenic, Anatolian and Indo-Iranian.
From 1942 to 1946, Lehmann served in the Signal Corps of the United States Army. During World War II he was an instructor in Japanese for the United States Army, and eventually became officer-in-charge of the Japanese Language School. The administrative experience and knowledge of non-Indo-European languages that he acquired during the war would have a major impact on his later career.
Since 1946, Lehmann taught at Washington University in St. Louis, where served as Instructor (1946) and Assistant Professor (1946–1949) in German. Wishing to focus more on linguistics and philology rather than only the German language, he arranged with Leonard Bloomfield to spend the summer at Yale University to catch up with advances in linguistics during the war, but these plans came to nothing after Bloomfield suffered a debilitating stroke.
In 1949, Lehmann transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, which at the time had about 12,000 students and was known for its strength in philology and for its university library. He subsequently served as Associate Professor (1949–1951) and Professor (1951–1962) of Germanic Languages at University of Texas at Austin. During this time Lehmann published his influential work "Proto-Indo-European Phonology" (1952).
Since 1953, Lehmann served as Chairman of the Department of Germanic Languages (1953–1964), Acting Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages (1960–1965). In 1963 he was made Ashbel Smith Professor of Linguistics and Germanic Linguistics (1963–1983). The Ashbel Smith professorship accorded him twice the salary of an ordinary professor. In 1964, Lehmann became the founding Chairman of the Department of Linguistics (1964–1972).
Lehmann was well known for his teaching style, and notably encouraged his students to seek to understand his lectures rather than just simply writing them down. Instead of only grading his students' papers and exams, he would give them detailed evaluations of their performance, and encouraged them to pursue and develop ideas. Lehmann strongly encouraged his students to seek having their works published in academic journals.
Under the leadership of Lehmann, the departments for Germanic languages and linguistics at University of Texas at Austin both became among the top five graduate programs in North America, which they remained for 25 years. Almost ten percent of all PhDs awarded in linguistics in the United States during this time came from the University of Texas at Austin. He supervised more than fifty PhDs and mentored hundreds of students, many of whom would acquire prominent positions in their respective fields.
Combined with his teaching and administrative duties, Lehmann was engaged with research and writing. His "Historical Linguistics: An Introduction" (1962) has been translated into Japanese, German, Spanish and Italian, and remains a standard work on historical linguistics. He edited the "Reader in Ninetenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics" (1967), which remains a standard work on both Indo-European, historical, and comparative linguistics. His "Proto-Indo-European Syntax" (1974) was hailed as breakthrough by linguist Robert J. Jeffers, who reviewed it in the journal "Language". "Studies in Descriptive and Historical Linguistics", a festschrift in Lehmann's honor, was published in 1977 under the editorship of Paul Hopper. His influential "Syntactic Typology" was published in 1981.
In 1983, Lehmann was made Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in the Humanities at University of Texas at Austin. He received the Harry H. Ransom Award for Teaching Excellence in the Liberal Arts in 1983, which he would describe as the greatest honor of his career. In 1984, together with fellow researcher Jonathan Slocum, Lehmann developed a groundbreaking prototype computer program for language translation, which the LRC put into commercial production for Siemens.
Lehmann retired as Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in 1986. Although having retired from teaching, he was still very active as a researcher at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and continued to write books and articles. In 1986 Lehmann founded the journal "Computers and Translation", now "Machine Translation", of which he was the founding editor. His "Gothic Etymological Dictionary" (1986) has been described as the best work ever published on Germanic etymology. He received the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1987.
Notable works authored by Lehmann during his final years include the third edition of "Historical Linguistics" (1992) and "Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics" (1993). "Language Change and Typological Variation", a second festschrift in his honor, was published by the Institute for the Study of Man in 1999 under the editorship of Edgar C. Polomé and Carol F. Justus. Lehmann completed his final monograph, "Pre-Indo-European" (2002), at the age of 86.
Lehmann was preceded in death by his wife Ruth and his son Terry, and died in Austin, Texas on August 1, 2007.
Throughout his career, Lehmann wrote more than fifty books and special issues of journals, and over 250 articles and more than 140 reviews. These works covered a diverse set of topics, including Middle High German literature, Japanese grammar, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, and textbooks on the German language. His contributions to the fields of Indo-European, Germanic and historical linguistics, and machine translation, have been significant, and several of his works on these subjects have remained standard texts up to the present day. He is remembered for his crucial role in establishing the University of Texas at Austin as one of America's leading institutions in linguistics, and for the large numbers of students that he taught and mentored, many of whom have made major contributions to scholarship.
Lehmann married Ruth Preston Miller on October 12, 1940, whom he met while studying at the University of Wisconsin. A specialist in Celtic linguistics and Old English, Ruth was Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Winfred and Ruth had two children, Terry Jon and Sandra Jean.
Winfred and Ruth were both environmentalists and loved animals. They donated of land in the northwest of Travis County, Texas to The Nature Conservancy to create the Ruth Lehmann Memorial Tract. The family inhabited a spacious house on Lake Travis, where they cared for rescued animals.
Aside from linguistics and the environment, Lehmann's great passion was literature, particularly early Germanic literature and the novels of his friend Raja Rao and James Joyce. He was also a skilled pianist. Lehmann was a close friend of John Archibald Wheeler, with whom he shared an interest for literature. Despite his wide circle of friends, Lehmann was nevertheless a very private man.
Brian J. Byrne (born 1942) is an Australian social scientist specializing in applied and psycholinguistics, an emeritus professor at the University of New England in Australia, and lead author of publications and articles on research in his field. Byrne was a lead researcher in the 10-year-long, $5 million National Institutes of Health study by an international team of scientists into the development of reading ability in 1,000 pairs of twins. Beginning in 2000, the study found that genetics were more important influences on reading development than environmental factors. In 2012, Byrne was appointed a lead researcher in a similar Australian study of twins.
In 2008, the researchers published the results of their research, finding that genetic factors were more influential than environmental ones in the development of reading ability in children. Byrne cautioned, however, that, "Intensive and well-designed classroom and preschool interventions can make a difference for struggling readers." Byrne was subsequently selected in 2012 as lead researcher for a follow-on study of 2,000 twins listed in the National Literacy and Numeracy Assessment.
Trevor Harley is emeritus chair of Cognitive Psychology His primary research is in the psychology of language. From 2003 until 2016 he was Head and Dean of the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom. He is author of "The Psychology of Language", currently in its fourth edition, published by Psychology Press, and "Talking the talk", a book about the psychology of language (psycholinguistics) aimed at a more general audience.
Trevor Harley was born in 1958 in London and grew up near Southampton. He was educated at Price's Grammar School, Fareham. His undergraduate degree was in Natural Sciences at St John's College in the University of Cambridge. He stayed at Cambridge to study for his PhD under the supervision of Brian Butterworth. His PhD was on "Slips of the tongue and what they tell us about speech production".
For his PhD and later research he collected a corpus of several thousand naturally occurring speech errors, and focused on one word substitutes for another (e.g. saying "pass the pepper" instead of "pass the salt"). He concluded that speech production is an interactive, parallel process, leading him to an interest in connectionist modeling, and research on computational modeling, ageing, and metacognition.
After his PhD he took a temporary lectureship at the University of Dundee. He then moved to the University of Warwick, where he stayed until 1996, then moving to a Senior Lectureship at Dundee. He was awarded a personal chair in 2003, and became Head of Department in the same year, and later Dean in 2006.
In addition to his academic work, he is an author of a novel, "Dirty old rascal" (), a fantasy about a cook set in the strange Castle where no misdeed goes unpunished. Harley has published an article, "Why the earth is almost flat: Imaging and the death of cognitive psychology". He has recently performed as a stand-up comic, performing at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013.
Harley's current main research interest is in metacognition, this interest grew out of his research on ageing and his interest in consciousness. More topics about his research on metacognition is covered in his forthcoming book, "Cognition: The mindful brain - why we behave as we do".
Another of his research interest includes how we produce language, although he now studies this in the wider context of how we represent meaning, how language is affected by brain damage, and by normal and pathological ageing (e.g. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases). He also works on how we control our own cognition, and how this ability changes with age. Underlying all his research is a belief that the mind is a parallel, interactive computer, best studied by experimentation and computational modeling. As well as his interest in language and computational modeling, he was also interested in the research of ageing and metacognition.
He is also interested in the weather, and maintains a site about severe weather events in Britain and the British weather in general available from trevorharley.com, calling this role as a "psychometeorologist". He also carries out psychological research about the weather, including why are people so interested in the weather? He maintains a weather station at Lundie near Dundee.
He wrote a famous article called Promises, Promises in which he argued that cognitive neuropsychologists have increasingly deviated from the original goals and methods of the subject.
One of Harley's most famous publications is the book "The Psychology of Language". In this book, he discusses psycholinguistics, which is the study of relationships that exist between linguistic behaviour and psychological processes. Harley discusses both the low cognitive level processes, including speech and visual word recognition, and the high cognitive level processes that are involved in comprehension. The text covers recent connectionist models of language, describing complex ideas in a clear and approachable manner. Following a strong developmental theme, the text describes how children acquire language (sometimes more than one), and also how they learn to read.
Drew Westen is professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; the founder of Westen Strategies, LLC, a strategic messaging consulting firm to nonprofits and political organizations; and a writer. He is also co-founder, with Joel Weinberger, of Implicit Strategies, a market research firm that measures consumers' unconscious responses to advertising and brands.
He grew up in North Carolina and Georgia, and received a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University, a Master of Arts in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex (England), and a Doctor of Philosophy in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, where he taught introductory psychology from 1985 to 1991.
Westen is a strategic messaging consultant for major nonprofit organizations and has been a consultant or advisor to progressive and Democratic organizations, including the House and Senate Democratic Caucuses.
In addition, Westen is a commentator on television, radio, in print, and online, who has been a frequent contributor to the opinion page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN.com and the Huffington Post. His 2011 article on Obama's leadership in the Sunday New York Times was one of the most widely read pieces in the history of the Sunday Times and drew considerable attention, including from the White House. The President and his close advisors were so incensed and concerned about its impact, because it captured popular opinion at the time about his leadership style, that they sent out a thirty-plus page email of talking points to friendly journalists to use when he was interviewed on television and radio.
At Harvard University and at Emory, Westen's work has focused on alternative ways of assessing and classifying personality disorders and developing and refining the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure as a tool for researchers and clinicians to help further the understanding of personality and its disorders. He is unusual among academic clinical psychologists in being both an active researcher and a practicing clinician for 20 years, who has written on what can be learned from both science and practice. This is reflected in over a decade's work on how to revise the diagnostic manual in psychiatry so that it is useful both to clinicians and researchers.
Much of Westen's theoretical work has attempted to bridge perspectives, particularly cognitive, psychodynamic, and evolutionary. He has published over 200 research papers in the scientific literature.
In January 2006 a group of scientists led by Westen announced at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Palm Springs, California the results of a study in which functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that self-described Democrats and Republicans responded to negative remarks about their political candidate of choice in systematically biased ways.
Subjects were then presented with information that exonerated their candidate of choice. When this occurred, areas of the brain involved in reward (notably dopamine-rich regions such as the striatum / nucleus accumbens) showed increased activity, essentially reinforcing both their positive feelings toward their favored candidate and defensive reasoning.