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Morten H. Christiansen

Professor of Psychology, Cornell University

Morten H. Christiansen is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University as well as Professor in Cognitive Science at the School of Communication and Culture and the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Senior Scientist at the Haskins Labs @ Yale. His research focuses on the interaction of biological and environmental constraints in the evolution, acquisition and processing of language. Christiansen is the author of over 250 scientific papers and has edited books on Connectionist Psycholinguistics, Language Evolution, Language Universals, and Cultural Evolution. His 2016 book Creating language: Integrating evolution, acquisition, and processing from MIT Press provides an overview of the work done in the CSL Lab. He new “popular” book, The Language Game: How improvisations created language and changed the world, aimed at a general audience, was published in 2022.

Experience

  • –present
    The William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Psychology, Cornell University

Education

  • 1995 
    University of Edinburgh, UK, PhD in Cognitive Science

Honours

Elected as a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and a foreign member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, as well as elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the Cognitive Science Society