Maya Hickmann (born 19 May 1953 in

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

; died 26 September 2019) was a linguist who specialized in

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 ...

and

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 ...

Education

Born in Egypt, Hickmann spent her early life in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

. She studied in the US, obtaining first a BA in

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

in 1973, then an MA from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

in 1975. Her PhD, awarded in 1982 by the same institution, dealt with the development of children's narrative skills and discourse cohesion, and was supervised by

David McNeill Glenn David McNeill (born 1933 in California, United States) is an American psychologist and writer specializing in scientific research into psycholinguistics and especially the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that accom ...

Career and honours

On her return to Europe in 1981, Hickmann took up a position as staff scientist at the newly founded

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik''; Dutch: ''Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek'') is a research institute located on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen in Nijm ...

Nijmegen Nijmegen ( , ; Nijmeegs: ) is the largest city in the Dutch province of Gelderland and the ninth largest of the Netherlands as a whole. Located on the Waal River close to the German border, Nijmegen is one of the oldest cities in the ...

under the direction of Wolfgang Klein. She spent ten years there, before moving to France in 1992 for a position at the Experimental Psychology Laboratory of the

French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 engi ...

(CNRS) based at

Paris Descartes University Paris Descartes University (), also known as Paris V, was a French public university located in Paris. It was one of the inheritors of the historic University of Paris, which was split into 13 universities in 1970. Paris Descartes completely merg ...

. In 1998 she received her

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...

, and in 2000 she was promoted to senior scientist (''directrice de recherche''). From 2008 she was co-director of the Formal Structures of Language lab, which she and

Clive Perdue Clive is a name. People and fictional characters with the name include: People Given name * Clive Allen (born 1961), English football player * Clive Anderson (born 1952), British television, radio presenter, comedy writer and former barrister * ...

had founded in 2007. In 2008 Hickman was elected ordinary 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 ...

. In the same year she founded the journal Language, Interaction and Acquisition, building on the existing journal ''Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère'' (Acquisition and Interaction in a Foreign Language; AILE) set up by Perdue.

Research

Hickmann's research took an experimental approach to big questions in psycholinguistics and language acquisition, especially acquisition by multilingual children. She was particularly interested in the development of discourse structure, and maintained research interests in

linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...

and linguistic universals. She worked with both typically and atypically developing populations, and her work on the development of motion expressions and spatial expressions has been particularly influential.

Selected publications

* Kail, Michèle, and Maya Hickmann. 1992. French children's ability to introduce referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge. ''First Language'' 12 (34), 73–94. * Hickmann, Maya. 1996. Discourse Organization and the Development of Reference to Person, Space, and Time. In Paul Fletcher & Brian MacWhinney (eds.), ''The Handbook of Child Language'', 194–218. Oxford: Blackwell. * Hickmann, Maya, Henriëtte Hendriks, Françoise Roland and James Liang. 1996. The marking of new information in children's narratives: a comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese. ''Journal of Child Language'' 23 (3), 591–619. * Hickmann, Maya, and Henriëtte Hendriks. 1999. Cohesion and anaphora in children's narratives: A comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. ''Journal of Child Language'' 26 (2), 419–452. * Hickmann, Maya. 2002. ''Children's discourse: person, space and time across languages.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hickmann, Maya Women linguists Developmental psycholinguists 1953 births 2019 deaths Research directors of the French National Centre for Scientific Research Cornell University alumni University of Chicago alumni Members of Academia Europaea