Morton H. Christiansen (Department of Psychology, Cornell University)
Tentatively scheduled: March 24, 2010
Time, Location and Talk Title TBA
About Dr. Christiansen:
Dr. Morten H. Christiansen is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. His research integrates connectionist modeling, statistical analyses, behavioral experimentation, and event-related potential (ERP) methods in the study of statistical learning and processing of complex sequential structure, in particular as related to the acquisition, processing and evolution of language. He received his PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh and has previously been a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow at the Philosophy, Neuroscience and Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis, an Advanced Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Neural, Informational and Behavioral Sciences Program at the University of Southern California, and an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Linguistics at Southern Illinois University before joining Cornell University.
He is the editor of Connectionist Psycholinguistics (with Nick Chater, Ablex, 2001) and Language Evolution (with Simon Kirby, Oxford Universiy Press, 2003). Moreover, Dr. Christiansen is currently in the process of writing a monograph (with Nick Chater, for Oxford Universiy Press), Creating language: Towards a unified framework for language acquisition, processing and evolution, tying together his research on language. Another monograph, Statistical Learning: Sensitivity to Statistical Structure across Cognition, is also underway (with Chris Conway and Luca Onnis, for Oxford University Press), aiming to provide a broad framework for understanding the computational, behavioral and neural underpinnings of statistical learning. Finally, an edited volume in progress, Language Universals (with Chris Collins and Shimon Edelman, for Oxford University Press), will provide a cross-disciplinary perspective on linguistic universals.
