Dan I. Slobin
Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics
linguistics (cognitive, functional, typological), psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, language and cognitive development, sign language, cross-cultural
Languages: German, Dutch, Yiddish, Russian, Spanish, French, Turkish
BA (psychology) Univ of Mich 1960; PhD (social relations: social psychology), Harvard 1964
Group:
Language & Cognition
Contact information
Email: slobin@berkeley.edu
Web site: http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/dslobin.html
Mailing address:
2323 Rose St., Berkeley, CA 94708
Berkeley, CA 94720
Personal statement
Dan I. Slobin is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at UC Berkeley, still actively involved in research and writing, as well as music, travel, and non-academic personal writing. Professionally he 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 sixties, being shaped by the emerging "cognitive revolution," and receiving a PhD in social psychology in 1964. Since then he has been at Berkeley, carrying out research on child language development in a crosslinguistic and crosscultural perspective. Slobin's research sites include the U.S., Turkey, Israel, Croatia, Spain, and the Netherlands, conducting research on early child language in a range of spoken and signed languages, as well as research on translation and contrastive rhetoric. Major questions deal with ways in which languages differ in their mappings between concepts and linguistic forms - what Slobin calls "thinking for speaking." In recent years he has become especially concerned with typological/functional linguistics and with the manual/visual modality of sign language and co-speech gesture. For the past twenty years or so he has been collaborating with his Dutch partner, Nini Hoiting, at the Royal Institute for the Deaf in the Netherlands, investigating the linguistics and acquisition of signed languages of the deaf.
Selected publications
Full bibliography and downloadable papers at http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/dslobin.htm.
Full CV
