Michael Tomasello

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Michael Tomasello (born in Bartow, Florida) is a developmental psychologist and a 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 of an innate universal grammar and instead proposing a usage-based theory (sometimes called the social-pragmatic approach to language acquisition) in which children learn linguistic structures through (i) intention-reading, and (ii) pattern-finding in their discourse interactions with others.

He was awarded the Fyssen Foundation Prize in 2004, the Jean Nicod Prize in Paris in May 2006, and the Mind and Brain Prize from the University of Torino in 2007.

[edit] 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]. (Winner of the William James Book Award of the APA, 2001).
Tomasello, M (2003) Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, Harvard University Press[14]. ISBN 0-674-01764-1[15] (Winner of the Cognitive Development Society Book Award, 2005).
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press.