Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions: Elissa L. Newport

The Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions are presented to persons who, in the opinion of the Committee on Scientific Awards, have made distinguished theoretical or empirical contributions to basic research in psychology. The 2020 recipients of the APA Scientific Contribution Awards were recognized by the 2019 Board of Scientific Affairs and selected by the 2019 Committee on Scientific Awards. For seminal contributions to our understanding of the role of early experience in acquiring the stable use of linguistic rules. Elissa L. Newport's multiple, influential lines of research include the innovative “less is more” theory about superior learning in children compared with adults, insightful studies of learning novel grammatical systems in the laboratory as a complement to studies of natural language acquisition, demonstration of the powerful role of statistical information in learning about words and their assignments to grammatical categories, and studies of the remarkable plasticity of the developing brain to acquire language despite injury. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved) © 2020 American Psychological Association