Dan Slobin

Dan I. Slobin is a cognitive/functional psycholinguist who explores the interfaces between child language, cognition, and linguistic typology. He began his career at Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies in the early 1960s, being shaped by the emerging “cognitive revolution,” and receiving a PhD in social psychology in 1964.  Since then he’s been at the University of California at Berkeley, conducting research on language and cognition and child language development in a range of spoken and signed languages.  His research sites include the United States, Turkey, Israel, Croatia, Italy, Spain, and The Netherlands; his students and collaborators have carried out research in dozens of countries. Slobin is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Linguistics, and a Research Psychologist at the Institute for Human Development and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, all at Berkeley.  From 1994 to 2009 he served as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Slobin is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Linguistic Society of America; he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a James McKeen Cattel Fellow in Psychology. In 2002 Slobin was named the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies at UC Berkeley. In 2014 the International Association for the Study of Child Language presented Slobin with the Roger Brown Award “to honor services and dedication to the field of child language.” In addition to academic research and writing, Slobin writes and translates poetry; writes about music, painting, and architecture; and plays classical piano.