Dorit Diskin Ravid (

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

: דורית רביד; born 1952) is a professor of

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) is a Public university, public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Located in northwest Tel Aviv, the university is the center of teaching and ...

, specializing in

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

with a focus on

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and s ...

Education, career and honours

Ravid’s early studies were carried out under the mentorship of Ruth A. Berman. She has spent her whole career post-PhD at Tel Aviv University. Hired initially as a lecturer in 1994, she was promoted to senior lecturer (with tenure) in 1998, associate professor in 2003, and full professor in 2007. In 2011 she was elected as a member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

. Before this, in 2005, she was awarded an International Francqui Chair at the

University of Antwerp The University of Antwerp () is a major Belgian university located in the city of Antwerp. The official abbreviation is ''UAntwerp''. The University of Antwerp has about 20,000 students, which makes it the third-largest university in Flanders. ...

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

. She has also served as Chair of the Israel Organization for Language and Literacy between 2005 and 2009. In 2022 she was the recipient of a

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

, ''Developing Language and Literacy: Studies in Honor of Dorit Diskin Ravid''.

Research

Ravid’s research has focused on language acquisition, both in children and adolescents, touching also on the fields of

language change Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language, or of languages in general, over time. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistic ...

and

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies unde ...

. Her research is carried out within a usage-based framework. Her 1995 book ''Language Change in Child and Adult

'' investigated variation and change in ten different groups of Modern Hebrew speakers, taking into account age, level of education, and socio-economic status, leading her to propose that the development of literacy goes hand in hand with cognitive maturation; the book has been described as pathbreaking.Berman (2022), Developmental pathways in child and adult Hebrew: the case of the subordinator ''še-'', p4. In Levie et al. (eds.), 3–34.

Selected publications

* Ravid, Dorit D. 1995. ''Language change in child and adult Hebrew: A psycholinguistic perspective.'' Oxford: Oxford University Press. * Ravid, Dorit D., and Liliana Tolchinsky. 2002. Developing linguistic literacy: A comprehensive model. ''Journal of Child Language'' 29(2), 417-447. * Berman, Ruth A., and Dorit D. Ravid. 2009. Becoming a literate language user: oral and written text construction across adolescence. In David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (eds.), ''The Cambridge handbook of literacy'', 92–110. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * DeKeyser, Robert, Iris Alfi-Shabtay and Dorit D. Ravid. 2010. Cross-linguistic evidence for the nature of age effects in second language acquisition. ''Applied Psycholinguistics'' 31(3), 413-438. * Ravid, Dorit D. 2011. ''Spelling morphology: the psycholinguistics of Hebrew spelling''. New York: Springer.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ravid, Dorit Living people Tel Aviv University alumni Academic staff of Tel Aviv University Women linguists Psycholinguists 1952 births Members of Academia Europaea