Dieter Gilberto Hillert () is a German-American biolinguist and cognitive scientist. His research focuses on the human language faculty as a cognitive and neurological system. He is known for work on the neurobiology of language, real-time

sentence processing Sentence processing takes place whenever a reader or listener processes a language utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a conversation or a text. Many studies of the human language comprehension process have focused on reading of s ...

, and language evolution. He advocates comparative evolutionary studies of cognition, argues against tabula rasa models, and favors computational theories of mind.

Biography

Hillert was born in Wiesbaden-Sonnenberg ( West Germany) in 1956, as second son of Guido Joachim Hillert, an aerospace and civil engineer, and his wife Charlotte Hillert, née Holland-Cunz. He spent his youth in Wiesbaden and attended Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He was clinically trained in

neurolinguistics Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that controls the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as n ...

at the medical school of the RWTH Aachen, Germany. Hillert received his degrees up to the Ph.D. and

Habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...

( Priv.-Doz.) from the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. His academic career started as a post-doc for neurolinguistics in France at the Centre Paul Broca in Paris, in the United States at Boston University and MIT, in Canada at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He was then appointed as a

lecturer Lecturer is an List of academic ranks, academic rank within many universities, though the meaning of the term varies somewhat from country to country. It generally denotes an academic expert who is hired to teach on a full- or part-time basis. T ...

at the University of Manchester in England, and continued his academic career at the University of California, San Diego in the United States. At present, he is an

adjunct professor An adjunct professor is a type of academic appointment in higher education who does not work at the establishment full-time. The terms of this appointment and the job security of the tenure vary in different parts of the world, however the genera ...

at San Diego State University. Occasionally, he lectures in

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

, inter alia, at the

Kyoto University , mottoeng = Freedom of academic culture , established = , type = National university, Public (National) , endowment = ¥ 316 billion (2.4 1000000000 (number), billion USD) , faculty = 3,480 (Teaching Staff) , administrative_staff ...

and the University of Tokyo. He contributes to the science of language by publishing theoretical and experimental research on various language-related themes such as

, figurative language, semantics and

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

bilingualism Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...

, aphasia, and language evolution. He received several awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Books and Volumes

*Hillert, D. (Ed. 2017). Language Evolution. On the Origin of Lexical and Syntactic Structures. ''Journal of Neurolinguistics'' 43 (B), p. 75-274. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-neurolinguistics/vol/43/part/https *Hillert, D. (2017). ''Die Natur der Sprache. Evolution, Paradigmen & Schaltkreise''. Heidelberg: Springer. *Hillert, D. (2014). ''The Nature of Language. Evolution, Paradigms & Circuits''. New York: Springer. *Hillert, D. (Ed. 1998). ''Sentence Processing: A Cross-linguistic Perspective. Syntax and Semantics 31''. San Diego: Academic Press. *Hillert, D. (Ed. 1994). Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience: Theoretical and Empirical Studies on Language Disorders. ''Linguistische Berichte 6''. *Hillert, D. (1990). ''Sprachprozesse und Wissensstrukturen''. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. *Hillert, D. (1987). ''Zur mentalen Repräsentation von Wortbedeutungen''. Tübinger Beiträge Linguistik 290. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

Selected Articles and Essays

*Hillert, D.G. (2023). On how “early syntax” came about. ''Front. Lang. Sci.'' 2: 1251498. https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2023.1251498 *Hillert, D.G. & Fujita, K. (2023). Pragmatic language in genus Homo. ''Biolinguistics'' 17: e11911. https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.11911 *Hillert, D. (2021). How did language evolve in the lineage of higher primates? ''Lingua'' 264, 103158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2021.103158 *Hillert, D. (2019). ''Neurobiology of Language''. In K. Shackelford and V.A. Weekes-Shackelford (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Cham: Springer. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3334-2 *Hillert D.G. (2017). ''Nimm's nicht so wörtlich''. In: S. Ayan (Ed.) Rätsel Mensch - Expeditionen im Grenzbereich von Philosophie und Hirnforschung. Heidelberg: Springer. *Hillert, D.G. (2012). ''Figuras retóricas: un reto para el cerebro''. Edición española de Scientific American: Mente y Cerebro Nº 55, 38-42. ISSN 1695-0887 *Hillert, D. (2015). On the Evolving Biology of Language. ''Frontiers in Psychology'' 6, 1796. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01796 *Hillert, D.G. & Buracas, G.T. (2009). The Neural Substrates of Spoken Idiom Comprehension. ''Language and Cognitive Processes'' 24 (9), 1370-1391. http://doi.org/10.1080/01690960903057006 *Hillert, D.G. (2008). On Idioms: Cornerstones of a Neurological Model of Language Processing. ''Journal of Cognitive Science'' 9(2), 193-233. http://hdl.handle.net/10371/7090 *Hillert, D. & Ackerman, F. (2002). ''Accessing and Parsing Phrasal Predicates''. In N. Dehé, R. Jackendoff, A. McIntryre, and S. Urban (Eds.) Verb-Particle Explorations. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, p. 289-313. http://doi.org/10.1515/9783110902341 *Hillert, D. & Swinney, D. (2001). ''The Processing of Fixed Expressions during Sentence Comprehension''. In A. Cienki, B.J. Luka, and M.B. Smith (Eds.) Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. Stanford: CSLI, p. 107-121. *Hillert, D. (2001). On Processing Lexical Concepts in Aphasia and Alzheimer's disease. Some (Re)considerations. ''Brain and Language'' 69, 95-118. https://doi.org/10.1006/brln.1999.2053 *Hillert, D. (1992). Semantics and Aphasia: A State-of-the-Art review. ''Journal of Neurolinguistics'' 7 (1), 1-43. https://doi.org/10.1016/0911-6044(92)90010-T

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hillert, Dieter Living people Goethe University Frankfurt German psychologists University of California, San Diego faculty San Diego State University faculty Year of birth missing (living people) RWTH Aachen University alumni