Dan Slobin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2007)

Dan Isaac Slobin is an American psychologist working at the University of California, Berkeley, who has made major contributions to the study of children's language acquisition.

Slobin has extensively studied the organization of information about spatial relations and motion events by speakers of different languages, including both children and adults. He has argued that becoming a competent speaker of a language requires learning certain language-specific modes of thinking, which he dubbed "thinking for speaking". Slobin's "thinking for speaking" view can be described as a contemporary, moderate version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which claims that the language we learn shapes the way we perceive reality and think about it. This view is often contrasted with the "language acquisition device" view of Noam Chomsky and others, who think of language acquisition as a process largely independent of learning and cognitive development.

Slobin's work has demonstrated the importance of cross-linguistic comparison for the study of language acquisition and psycholinguistics in general.