science

Melissa Bowerman

Melissa Bowerman is a science 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 Melissa Bowerman rather than just read about it. In short: Melissa Bowerman (April 3, 1942 – October 31, 2011) was a leading researcher in the area of language acquisition. From 1982 to 2007, she was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Key takeaways

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

Reference excerpt

Melissa Bowerman (April 3, 1942 – October 31, 2011) was a leading researcher in the area of language acquisition. From 1982 to 2007, she was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Education and career In 1971, Bowerman earned her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, where she studied under Roger Brown. She held positions at the University of Kansas from 1970 until 1982, when she joined the Max Planck Institute. Within the field of language acquisition, she specialized in the relationships between language and cognition, language and spatial representation, and language and event representation. Recurrent themes in her work included the relationship between conceptual development and language development, the use of cross-linguistic comparisons to disentangle what is universal and possibly innate from what is learned, the nature of children's early linguistic rules, and the potential of information about language acquisition to help decide among alternative theoretical approaches to language structure. Bowerman was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on 1 October 2011. A volume of papers in her honor, Routes to Language, was published by Psychology Press in 2015.

Key publications Bowerman, Melissa. 1973. Early syntactic development: a cross-linguistic study with special reference to Finnish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Choi, S., Bowerman, M., Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns, (1991) Cognition, 41 (1-3), pp. 83–121. Majid, A., Bowerman, M., Kita, S., Haun, D.B.M., Levinson, S.C., Can language restructure cognition? The case for space, (2004) Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8 (3), pp. 108–114. Choi, S., McDonough, L., Bowerman, M., Mandler, J.M., Early Sensitivity to Language-Specific Spatial Categories in English and Korean, (1999) Cognitive Development, 14 (2), pp. 241–268. Bowerman, Melissa, and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 2001. Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Majid, A., Bowerman, M., Van Staden, M., Boster, J.S., The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective, (2007) Cognitive Linguistics, 18 (2), pp. 133–152. Bowerman, Melissa, and Penelope Brown, eds. 2008. Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

References

External links Curriculum Vitae at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics LINGUIST list obituary

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Melissa Bowerman

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Melissa Bowerman claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, 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 Melissa Bowerman 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 Melissa Bowerman 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 Melissa Bowerman

In research: Melissa Bowerman appears in science 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 Melissa Bowerman 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: Melissa Bowerman is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1942 births, 2011 deaths, 20th-century American psychologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Melissa Bowerman 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 Melissa Bowerman in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Melissa Bowerman 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 Melissa Bowerman out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Melissa Bowerman in simple terms?

Why does Melissa Bowerman matter?

Because it connects several science 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 Melissa Bowerman?

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 Melissa Bowerman.