Santa Fe Institute

Bio

 I grew up in northern New Mexico, with strong interests in the peoples, cultures, and languages of the region.  This was nurtured by studying Anthropology at UNM. However, my study of Spanish led me to Mexico and then South America, where I finally came to realize that my true passion was linguistics, and the study of how language is learned. The pursuit of my research questions eventually led me to southern Africa, where I carried out a longitudinal study of children’s language development for several years. This lead to a career in developmental psycholinguistics.

My research has come to focus on how children construct a grammar from what they hear around them. This has lead me to conduct comparative/crosslinguistic studies where it is possible to make predictions about the course of language acquisition, what will be acquired early and late, and why. In particular, we have found the frequency of certain structures – be they phonological (e.g. syllable structure) or syntactic (e.g. passives), appears to influence the course and rate of linguistic development across languages. This suggests that information-theoretic, probabilistic models of language learnability may provide insight into how language learning is achieved, an area I have been jointly exploring with Mark Johnson. However, we also know that some structures are simply easier to learn than others, and may therefore be acquired first. Much still remains to be explored in this area, since most research has been only on English. To date my research has focused on monolingual learners of Romance, Germanic and Bantu languages. Now that I am living in Australia, various Asian and Aboriginal languages, as well as bilinguals, are emerging as possible test beds for exploring and modeling these hypotheses further.  My linguistic interests therefore constitute a natural intellectual link to the Evolution of Human Languages Project, a topic in which I have had a long-standing interest.

My intellectual interests, however, are extremely broad, encompassing many facets of human behavior and society. I would therefore welcome the opportunity to explore these and other issues with others at SFI over the coming years.