Ellen Markman is Lewis M. Terman

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

at Stanford University. She specializes in word learning and

language development Language development in humans is a process starting 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 begi ...

in children, focusing specifically on how children come to associate words with their meanings. Markman contends that in order to learn the meaning of a word, children make use of three basic principles: the whole object assumption (words refer to an object rather than to its parts or features), the taxonomic assumption (labels should be extended to an object of the same kind rather than an object that is thematically related), and the mutual exclusivity assumption (another label can be used to refer to a feature or part of an object). Related topics that Markman has studied include categorization and inductive reasoning in children and infants. Markman subscribes to the innatist school of developmental psychologists, which asserts that children possess innate knowledge that they draw upon in the process of language acquisition. Her contribution to cognitive and developmental psychology has had significant impact in the field and has been recognized by awards such as the

American Psychological Society The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in ...

's William James Fellow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Basic Research and the

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...

’s Division 7 Outstanding Mentoring Award. She was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

in 2003 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.

Education and career

Markman received a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

in 1973. She has been employed as a tenure-track faculty member in the Department of Psychology since 1975, for which she served as Chair 1994-1997. Markman currently serves as Senior Associate Dean of the Social Sciences of the School of

Humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...

and

Social Sciences Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...

. She has also served as Stanford's faculty representative to the

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and the Pacific-10 Conference.

Book

''Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction'', MIT Press (1989)

References

External links

The Markman LabEllen Markman's Faculty biography
* ttps://historicalsociety.stanford.edu/publications/markman-ellen-m "Ellen M. Markman: An Oral History,"Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program, 2017. {{DEFAULTSORT:Markman, Ellen Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Developmental psycholinguists Women cognitive scientists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences University of Pennsylvania alumni Stanford University Department of Psychology faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society