Elissa L. Newport

Last updated
Elissa Lee Newport
Bornc. 1947 (age 75–76)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Barnard College of Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania
Spouse Ted Supalla
Awards Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Sciences, 2015
Scientific career
Fields Language acquisition & developmental linguistics
Institutions University of California, San Diego, University of Illinois, University of Rochester, Georgetown University
External videos
Nuvola apps kaboodle.svg “Elissa L. Newport, Ph.D. - 2015 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science”, The Franklin Institute

Elissa Lee Newport is a professor of neurology and director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University. She specializes in language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on the relationship between language development and language structure, and most recently on the effects of pediatric stroke on the organization and recovery of language. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Biography

Newport graduated from Ladue Horton Watkins High School in Ladue, Missouri in 1965. [4] Newport attended Wellesley College from 1965 to 1967 and in 1969 graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University. [5] Newport received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, where her advisors were Lila Gleitman and Henry Gleitman. [6]

She was a member of the faculty in the department of psychology at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Illinois before joining the faculty at the University of Rochester, where she was chair of the department and the George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. In July 2012, she joined the faculty at Georgetown University where she became the founding director of the newly established Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery. [3] [7] Dr. Newport is married to Ted Supalla, who is also a professor in the department of neurology at Georgetown University.

In 2017, Newport and eight other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the University of Rochester for its handling of sexual misconduct complaints against another professor. [8] In 2020, the university settled the case for $9.4 million. [9]

Research interests

Newport studies both normal acquisition and creolization using miniature languages presented to learners in the lab, where both the input and the structure of the language can be controlled, to see how the learning process actually works. A second line of research concerns maturational effects on language learning, comparing children to adults as first and second language learners, and asking why children, who are more limited in most cognitive domains, perform better than adults in language acquisition. [10] She also conducts studies of human learners acquiring musical and other nonlinguistic patterns, and of nonhuman primates attempting to learn the same materials, to see where sequential learning, and the constraints on such learning, differ across species and domains. [11] A long-term interest concerns understanding why languages universally display certain types of structures, and considers whether constraints on pattern learning in children may provide part of the basis for universal regularities in languages of the world. [12] Her most recent work investigates language and the brain, using MRI to examine how sign and oral languages are represented in the brain and how language is reorganized after damage or disease. [13]

Statistical Learning

With Richard N. Aslin and Jenny Saffran, [14] Newport introduced statistical learning to the study of natural language acquisition: the hypothesis that infants, young children, and adults acquire the structure of languages by computing the statistics of the co-occurrence of elements - which elements of the sound stream occur most frequently, and which elements occur consistently together or predictively - and using these statistics to find the words, phrases, and sentence structures of their languages. They suggested that this process is implicit (therefore related to the more general notion of implicit learning) and can be done rapidly and online during language listening. [15] Newport and Aslin have gone on from their initial study of word segmentation [14] [16] to reveal the statistical computations done by children and adults in forming word categories, [17] verb argument structure [18] and phrase structure [19] and also have shown that this type of computation is not unique to language but appears to be a widespread computational ability that appears in other modalities and domains as well. [20] [21] [22] [23]

Less is More Hypothesis

One of Newport's most well-known contributions to the field of language acquisition research is the Less is More Hypothesis. [2] In this hypothesis, Newport posits that children are better able to learn languages than adults because they have fewer cognitive resources available to them. This is advantageous in learning a complex combinatorial system such as a human language because children, given their cognitive limitations, will naturally proceed by beginning with small parts and will acquire more complex constructions only as they mature. In contrast, more competent adults will begin by trying to analyze more complexity from the start and will have difficulty finding the best analyses. [24] In her natural language studies she has shown that learners who begin in childhood show much greater ultimate proficiency in both first and second languages than those who begin in adulthood. [24] [25] In her miniature language studies she has shown that children and adults differ in language learning in well controlled studies in the lab, with young children acquiring regular patterns and rules even when their input is inconsistent. [26] [27] [28] This regularization process provides an explanation of how children may contribute to the formation of languages over generations.

Awards and honors

Newport has been recognized by a number of organizations for the impact of her theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of language acquisition. She has been elected as a fellow in the American Philosophical Society, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, [29] [30] the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Packard Foundation. [31]

In 2015, she was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Sciences. [2] She had previously received the Claude Pepper Award of Excellence from the NIH, and the William James Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Research, the highest honor given by the Association for Psychological Science (APS). [32]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive science</span> Interdisciplinary scientific study of cognitive processes

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Learning theory (education)</span> Theory that describes how students receive, process, and retain knowledge during learning

Learning theory describes how students receive, process, and retain knowledge during learning. Cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences, as well as prior experience, all play a part in how understanding, or a worldview, is acquired or changed and knowledge and skills retained.

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Universal grammar</span> Theory of the biological component of the language faculty

Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare, and the theory of universal grammar remains controversial among linguists.

In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that gained credence in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition. Cognitive psychology derived its name from the Latin cognoscere, referring to knowing and information, thus cognitive psychology is an information-processing psychology derived in part from earlier traditions of the investigation of thought and problem solving.

In cognitive psychology, fast mapping is the term used for the hypothesized mental process whereby a new concept is learned based only on minimal exposure to a given unit of information. Fast mapping is thought by some researchers to be particularly important during language acquisition in young children, and may serve to explain the prodigious rate at which children gain vocabulary. In order to successfully use the fast mapping process, a child must possess the ability to use "referent selection" and "referent retention" of a novel word. There is evidence that this can be done by children as young as two years old, even with the constraints of minimal time and several distractors. Previous research in fast mapping has also shown that children are able to retain a newly learned word for a substantial amount of time after they are subjected to the word for the first time. Further research by Markson and Bloom (1997), showed that children can remember a novel word a week after it was presented to them even with only one exposure to the novel word. While children have also displayed the ability to have equal recall for other types of information, such as novel facts, their ability to extend the information seems to be unique to novel words. This suggests that fast mapping is a specified mechanism for word learning. The process was first formally articulated and the term 'fast mapping' coined Susan Carey and Elsa Bartlett in 1978.

Linda B. Smith is an American developmental psychologist internationally recognized for her theoretical and empirical contributions to developmental psychology and cognitive science, proposing, through theoretical and empirical studies, a new way of understanding developmental processes. Smith's works are groundbreaking and illuminating for the field of perception, action, language, and categorization, showing the unique flexibility found in human behavior. She has shown how perception and action are ways of obtaining knowledge for cognitive development and word learning.

The critical period hypothesis or sensitive period hypothesis claims that there is an ideal time window of brain development to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further language acquisition becomes much more difficult and effortful. It is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in their 1959 book Speech and Brain Mechanisms, and was popularized by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 with Biological Foundations of Language.

In linguistics, the innateness hypothesis, also known as the nativist hypothesis, holds that humans are born with at least some knowledge of linguistic structure. On this hypothesis, language acquisition involves filling in the details of an innate blueprint rather than being an entirely inductive process. The hypothesis is one of the cornerstones of generative grammar and related approaches in linguistics. Arguments in favour include the poverty of the stimulus, the universality of language acquisition, as well as experimental studies on learning and learnability. However, these arguments have been criticized, and the hypothesis is widely rejected in other traditions such as usage-based linguistics. The term was coined by Hilary Putnam in reference to the views of Noam Chomsky.

Lila Ruth Gleitman was an American professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on children's learning of their first language.

Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Goldin-Meadow</span> American psychologist

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development, the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.

Educational neuroscience is an emerging scientific field that brings together researchers in cognitive neuroscience, developmental cognitive neuroscience, educational psychology, educational technology, education theory and other related disciplines to explore the interactions between biological processes and education. Researchers in educational neuroscience investigate the neural mechanisms of reading, numerical cognition, attention and their attendant difficulties including dyslexia, dyscalculia and ADHD as they relate to education. Researchers in this area may link basic findings in cognitive neuroscience with educational technology to help in curriculum implementation for mathematics education and reading education. The aim of educational neuroscience is to generate basic and applied research that will provide a new transdisciplinary account of learning and teaching, which is capable of informing education. A major goal of educational neuroscience is to bridge the gap between the two fields through a direct dialogue between researchers and educators, avoiding the "middlemen of the brain-based learning industry". These middlemen have a vested commercial interest in the selling of "neuromyths" and their supposed remedies.

Richard N. Aslin is an American psychologist. He is currently a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories and professor at Yale University. Until December, 2016, Dr. Aslin was William R. Kenan Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Sciences at the University of Rochester. During his time in Rochester, he was also Director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging and the Rochester Baby Lab. He had worked at the university for over thirty years, until he resigned in protest of the university's handling of a sexual harassment complaint about a junior member of his department.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Embodied cognition</span> Interdisciplinary theory

Embodied cognition is the concept suggesting that many features of cognition are shaped by the state and capacities of the organism. The cognitive features include a wide spectrum of cognitive functions, such as perception biases, memory recall, comprehension and high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.

Statistical language acquisition, a branch of developmental psycholinguistics, studies the process by which humans develop the ability to perceive, produce, comprehend, and communicate with natural language in all of its aspects through the use of general learning mechanisms operating on statistical patterns in the linguistic input. Statistical learning acquisition claims that infants' language-learning is based on pattern perception rather than an innate biological grammar. Several statistical elements such as frequency of words, frequent frames, phonotactic patterns and other regularities provide information on language structure and meaning for facilitation of language acquisition.

Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory in developmental psycholinguistics and language acquisition which proposes that children learn word meanings by recognizing syntactic categories and the structure of their language. It is proposed that children have innate knowledge of the links between syntactic and semantic categories and can use these observations to make inferences about word meaning. Learning words in one's native language can be challenging because the extralinguistic context of use does not give specific enough information about word meanings. Therefore, in addition to extralinguistic cues, conclusions about syntactic categories are made which then lead to inferences about a word's meaning. This theory aims to explain the acquisition of lexical categories such as verbs, nouns, etc. and functional categories such as case markers, determiners, etc.

Statistical learning is the ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment. Although statistical learning is now thought to be a generalized learning mechanism, the phenomenon was first identified in human infant language acquisition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fei Xu</span> American Professor of Psychology

Fei Xu is an American developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist who is currently a professor of psychology and the director of the Berkeley Early Learning Lab at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on cognitive and language development, from infancy to middle childhood.

Kathleen Rastle is a cognitive psychologist and Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London where she was previously the Head of Department of Psychology (2015-2019). Her research has made fundamental contributions to understanding of reading and learning to read.

References

  1. ↑ DeAngelis, Tori (2013). "New hope for the damaged brain". Monitor on Psychology. 44 (5): 40. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 "Elissa L. Newport". The Franklin Institute. 2014-10-27. Retrieved 2 December 2015.
  3. 1 2 Mallet, Karen (July 11, 2012). "Georgetown University, MedStar National Rehabilitation Network Create Unique Brain Center". Georgetown University Medical Center. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  4. ↑ "Ladue Horton Watkins High School". 50th Reunion Ladue Horton Watkins High School. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  5. ↑ Mortarboard 1968. New York City: Barnard College. 1968. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  6. ↑ Landau, Barbara, ed. (2000). Perception, cognition, and language : essays in honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. p. 7. ISBN   9780262122283.
  7. ↑ "Elissa Newport, Ph.D." Georgetown University. Retrieved 2 December 2015.
  8. ↑ Colleen Flaherty, "No closure at Rochester," Inside HigherEd, 12 January 2018.
  9. ↑ Alexandra Witze, "University pays millions to researchers who sued over sexual-harassment allegations," Science, 27 March 2020.
  10. ↑ Newport, Elissa (2000). "A Nativist's view of learning: How to combine the Gleitmans in a theory of language acquisition". In Landau, Barbara (ed.). Perception, cognition, and language : essays in honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp. 105–120. ISBN   9780262122283.
  11. ↑ De Silva, Clarence W. (2000). Intelligent Machines: Myths and Realities. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press. pp. 132–133. ISBN   9780849303302 . Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  12. ↑ Kolata, Gina (September 1, 1992). "Linguists Debate Study Classifying Language As Innate Human Skill". New York Times. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  13. ↑ "Reflecting on lifetimes of achievement". Observer. 26 (9). 2013. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  14. 1 2 Saffran, J. R.; Aslin, R. N.; Newport, E. L. (13 December 1996). "Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants". Science. 274 (5294): 1926–1928. Bibcode:1996Sci...274.1926S. doi:10.1126/science.274.5294.1926. PMID   8943209. S2CID   13321604.
  15. ↑ Rebuschat, Patrick (2012). Statistical learning and language acquisition. Boston, Massachusetts: De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN   978-1-934078-24-2.
  16. ↑ Saffran, J. R.; Newport, E. L.; Aslin, R. N. (1996). "Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues" (PDF). Journal of Memory and Language. 35 (4): 606–621. doi:10.1006/jmla.1996.0032 . Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  17. ↑ Reeder, Patricia A.; Newport, Elissa L.; Aslin, Richard N. (2013). "From shared contexts to syntactic categories: The role of distributional information in learning linguistic form-classes" (PDF). Cognitive Psychology. 66 (1): 30–54. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2012.09.001. PMC   3621024 . PMID   23089290. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  18. ↑ Wonnacott, E; Newport, EL; Tanenhaus, MK (May 2008). "Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: distributional learning in a miniature language". Cognitive Psychology. 56 (3): 165–209. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2007.04.002. PMC   2405816 . PMID   17662707.
  19. ↑ Thompson, Susan P.; Newport, Elissa L. (2007). "Statistical Learning of Syntax: The Role of Transitional Probability" (PDF). Language Learning and Development. 3 (1): 1–42. doi:10.1080/15475440709336999. S2CID   220405689. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  20. ↑ Saffran, J.; Newport, E.; Aslin, R.; Tunick, R. A.; Barrueco, S. (1997). "Incidental language learning: Listening (and learning) out of the corner of your ear". Psychological Science. 8 (2): 101–105. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00690.x. S2CID   18122168.
  21. ↑ Creel, Sarah C.; Newport, Elissa L.; Aslin, Richard N. (2004). "Distant Melodies: Statistical Learning of Nonadjacent Dependencies in Tone Sequences" (PDF). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 30 (5): 1119–1130. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.222.5584 . doi:10.1037/0278-7393.30.5.1119. PMID   15355140. S2CID   1201841. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 December 2015. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  22. ↑ Fiser, József; Aslin, Richard N. (2005). "Encoding Multielement Scenes: Statistical Learning of Visual Feature Hierarchies" (PDF). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 134 (4): 521–537. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.211.2957 . doi:10.1037/0096-3445.134.4.521. PMID   16316289. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 December 2015. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  23. ↑ Gebhart, Andrea L.; Aslin, Richard N.; Newport, Elissa L. (August 2009). "Changing Structures in Midstream: Learning Along the Statistical Garden Path". Cognitive Science. 33 (6): 1087–1116. doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01041.x. PMC   2889674 . PMID   20574548.
  24. 1 2 Newport, Elissa L. (1990). "Maturational Constraints on Language Learning". Cognitive Science. 14 (1): 11–28. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog1401_2. S2CID   207056257.
  25. ↑ Johnson, JS; Newport, EL (1989). "Critical period effects in second language learning: the influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language". Cognitive Psychology. 21 (1): 60–99. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(89)90003-0. PMID   2920538. S2CID   15842890.
  26. ↑ Hudson Kam, Carla L.; Newport, Elissa L. (2005). "Regularizing Unpredictable Variation: The Roles of Adult and Child Learners in Language Formation and Change". Language Learning and Development. 1 (2): 151–195. doi:10.1080/15475441.2005.9684215. S2CID   2912459.
  27. ↑ Hudson Kam, Carla L.; Newport, Elissa L. (2009). "Getting it right by getting it wrong: When learners change languages" (PDF). Cognitive Psychology. 59 (1): 30–65. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2009.01.001. PMC   2703698 . PMID   19324332. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 December 2015. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  28. ↑ Culbertson, Jennifer; Newport, Elissa L. (June 2015). "Harmonic biases in child learners: In support of language universals". Cognition. 139: 71–82. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.02.007. PMC   4397919 . PMID   25800352.
  29. ↑ "Georgetown's Elissa L. Newport Selected to Receive 2015 Franklin Institute Award". Georgetown University. November 3, 2014. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  30. ↑ "Elissa L. Newport". LSA Institute 2005. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  31. ↑ "Elissa Newport". Brain & Cognitive Sciences. University of Rochester. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
  32. ↑ Mallet, Karen (2014-02-19). "Dr. Newport Awarded Lifetime Achievement Award from Association for Psychological Science". Georgetown University Medical Center. Retrieved 3 December 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.