Michael Tomasello

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Image:Text document with red question mark.svg

This article or section includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations.
You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations.

Michael Tomasello (born in Bartow, Florida) is a developmental psychologist and the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany).

Tomasello has worked to identify the unique cognitive and cultural processes that distinguish humans from their nearest primate relatives, the great apes. He studies the social-cognition of great apes at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig. In his developmental research he has focused on how human children become members of cultural groups, focusing in recent years on uniquely human skills and motivations for shared intentionality: joint intentions, joint attention, prosocial motives, and social norms.

Tomasello also works on child language acquisition as a crucially important aspect of the enculturation process. He subscribes to the cognitive linguistics school of linguistic theory. He is a critic of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar, rejecting the idea that any linguistic structure is universal (or based on innate knowledge) and instead proposing a usage-based theory (sometimes called the social-pragmatic approach to language acquisition) in which children learn linguistic structures through social-communicative and cognitive processes, such as joint attention and cultural learning.

He was awarded the Fyssen Foundation Prize in 2004 and the Jean Nicod Prize in Paris in May 2006.

Bibliography

Tomasello, M. & Call, J. (1997), Primate Cognition. Oxford University Press.
Tomasello, M (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Harvard University Press[12]. ISBN 0-674-00582-1[13].
Tomasello, M (2003) Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, Harvard University Press[14]. ISBN 0-674-01764-1[15]
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press.