A Cornell University professor acclaimed for his study of the evolution, acquisition and processing of language is this year’s recipient of the Distinguished Cognitive Scientist Award presented by UC Merced’s Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences .
Morten Christiansen, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell, is the 15th honoree of the award, which debuted in 2008. Initiated by a gift from Robert Glushko and Pamela Samuelson, the award is given each year to an individual who has contributed influential and groundbreaking work to cognitive science.
Christiansen will come to UC Merced on Oct. 14 to receive the award and give a public lecture.
“I’ve known Morten since were faculty together at Cornell a couple decades ago,” said UC Merced Professor Michael Spivey, a member of the award committee. “He is a truly interdisciplinary cognitive scientist who has made profound advances to our understanding of how language happens. He’s an elegant writer, an excellent presenter and a wonderful human being.”
Christiansen has forged new insights into how environmental and biological influences interact to shape language evolution, language learning and real-time language processing. His research — including neuroimaging and behavioral experiments, computational simulations and corpus analyses — has dramatically reshaped the landscape of the traditional debate over nature vs. nurture.
The Denmark native is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. Christiansen has authored more than 250 scientific papers. He co-authored the 2022 book “The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World.”
