Michael Tomasello

LSA 111: Evolution of language

Michael Tomasello is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. His research interests focus on processes of social cognition, social learning, and communication/language in human children and great apes. His books include First Verbs (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Primate Cognition (Oxford University Press, 1997), The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure (Vol 1 & 2; edited, Erlbaum, 1998; 2002), The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1999), Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (Harvard University Press, 2003), and Origins of Human Communication (MIT Press, 2008).

External website: http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/