Melissa Bowerman (April 3, 1942 – October 31, 2011) was a leading researcher in the area of language acquisition. From 1982 to 2007, she was a senior research fellow at the
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Education and career
In 1971, Bowerman earned her PhD in social psychology from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
, where she studied under
Roger Brown. She held positions at the
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas (KU) is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence, Kansas, United States. Two branch campuses are in the Kansas City metropolitan area on the Kansas side: the university's medical school and hospital ...
from 1970 until 1982, when she joined the Max Planck Institute.
Within the field of
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 ...
, she specialized in the relationships between
language and cognition, language and spatial representation, and language and event representation. Recurrent themes in her work included the relationship between
conceptual development and
language development
Language development in humans is a process which starts early in life. Infants start without knowing a language, yet by 10 months, babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning b ...
, the use of cross-linguistic comparisons to disentangle what is universal and possibly