| 1 | Name: | Dr. Elissa L. Newport | |
| Institution: | Georgetown University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2010 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 305 | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1947 | ||
Elissa Newport became the Director of the new Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, and Professor of Neurology, at Georgetown University in July 2012. She had been the George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and of Psychology at the University of Rochester since 1995. She began teaching at the University of California, San Diego, in 1974. She moved to the University of Illinois in 1979, then joined the University of Rochester faculty as Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and of Psychology in 1988. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2010. Elissa Newport has defined the modern approach to language learning with creative empirical research, insightful theory and computational analysis and modeling. She has led the way in identifying the critical importance of statistical learning (learning by combining individually ambiguous evidence across separate events) and has shown how within and cross-modality statistical learning can produce language learning in infants, children, deaf individuals and adults. Her research has also explored the stages of language learning and shown the importance of sensitive periods. Her influential "less is more" computational model assigns the advantage of younger over older learners to age related differences in data acquisition and categorization. Her best known research has demonstrated how infants (and adults) can use statistical information to segment speech units from continuous sound streams and combine these into words and phrases. She was awarded the Association of Psychological Science's William James Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Research in 2013. | |||