ABSTRACT
D an Slobin is a household name among scholars and students in the elds of linguistics and psychology. He has been a major intellectual and creative force in the eld of child language development, typological linguistics, and psycholinguistics for the past 40 years. A pioneer, creative theorist, and researcher, he has insisted on a rigorous, crosslinguistic approach in his attempt to identify universal developmental patterns in language learning, to explore the effects of particular types of languages on psycholinguistic processes, to determine the extent to which universals of language and language behavior are determined by modality (vocal/auditory vs. manual/visual), and, nally, to investigate the relation between linguistic and cognitive processes. His insights from languages with radically different structures to those of English have revolutionized the questions we ask about the cognitive bases of children’s language development, universals of language learning, and the contribution of formal and functional typological differences to understanding the psychology of language.
