astronomy

Maya Hickmann

Maya Hickmann is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Maya Hickmann rather than just read about it. In short: Maya Hickmann (born 19 May 1953 in Egypt; died 26 September 2019) was a linguist who specialized in language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Education Born in Egypt, Hickmann spent her early life in Paris.

Key takeaways

Maya Hickmann belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Maya Hickmann to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Maya Hickmann from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Maya Hickmann (born 19 May 1953 in Egypt; died 26 September 2019) was a linguist who specialized in language acquisition and psycholinguistics.

Education Born in Egypt, Hickmann spent her early life in Paris. She studied in the US, obtaining first a BA in psychology at Cornell University in 1973, then an MA from the University of Chicago in 1975. Her PhD, awarded in 1982 by the same institution, dealt with the development of children's narrative skills and discourse cohesion, and was supervised by David McNeill.

Career and honours On her return to Europe in 1981, Hickmann took up a position as staff scientist at the newly founded Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen under the direction of Wolfgang Klein. She spent ten years there, before moving to France in 1992 for a position at the Experimental Psychology Laboratory of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) based at Paris Descartes University. In 1998 she received her habilitation, and in 2000 she was promoted to senior scientist (directrice de recherche). From 2008 she was co-director of the Formal Structures of Language lab, which she and Clive Perdue had founded in 2007. In 2008 Hickman was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea. In the same year she founded the journal Language, Interaction and Acquisition, building on the existing journal Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère (Acquisition and Interaction in a Foreign Language; AILE) set up by Perdue.

Research Hickmann's research took an experimental approach to big questions in psycholinguistics and language acquisition, especially acquisition by multilingual children. She was particularly interested in the development of discourse structure, and maintained research interests in linguistic typology and linguistic universals. She worked with both typically and atypically developing populations, and her work on the development of motion expressions and spatial expressions has been particularly influential.

Selected publications Kail, Michèle, and Maya Hickmann. 1992. French children's ability to introduce referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge. First Language 12 (34), 73–94. doi:10.1177/014272379201203405 Hickmann, Maya. 1996. Discourse Organization and the Development of Reference to Person, Space, and Time. In Paul Fletcher & Brian MacWhinney (eds.), The Handbook of Child Language, 194–218. Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1111/b.9780631203124.1996.00008.x Hickmann, Maya, Henriëtte Hendriks, Françoise Roland and James Liang. 1996. The marking of new information in children's narratives: a comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language 23 (3), 591–619. doi:10.1017/S0305000900008965 Hickmann, Maya, and Henriëtte Hendriks. 1999. Cohesion and anaphora in children's narratives: A comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language 26 (2), 419–452. doi:10.1017/S0305000999003785 Hickmann, Maya. 2002. Children's discourse: person, space and time across languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139435147

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Maya Hickmann

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Maya Hickmann claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Maya Hickmann before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Maya Hickmann ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Maya Hickmann

In research: Maya Hickmann appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Maya Hickmann in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Maya Hickmann is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1953 births, 2019 deaths, Cornell University alumni, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Maya Hickmann outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Maya Hickmann in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Maya Hickmann means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Maya Hickmann out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Maya Hickmann in simple terms?

Maya Hickmann (born 19 May 1953 in Egypt; died 26 September 2019) was a linguist who specialized in language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Education Born in Egypt, Hickmann spent her early life in Paris.

Why does Maya Hickmann matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Maya Hickmann?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Maya Hickmann.