Dan I. Slobin

Dan I. Slobin is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at UC Berkeley, still actively involved in research and writing, as well as 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 Ph D in social psychology in 1964. Since then he has been at the University of California 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. His students and collaborators have carried out research in dozens of countries. A major focus of the work is 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.  His CV, bibliography, and downloadable papers are available at http://ihd.berkeley.edu/members.htm#slobin.