astronomy

Stephen Crain

Stephen Crain 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 Stephen Crain rather than just read about it. In short: Stephen Crain is the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), and a distinguished professor at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. He is a well-known researcher specializing in language acquisition, focusing specifically on syntax and semantics.

Key takeaways

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

Reference excerpt

Stephen Crain is the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), and a distinguished professor at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. He is a well-known researcher specializing in language acquisition, focusing specifically on syntax and semantics. Crain views language acquisition as based on language-specific faculties, and he conducts his research in the tradition of Chomskyan generative grammar. Recently, Crain has proposed that language is based on a universal logical system, and he has begun to explore the neural correlates of language acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Crain received a BA in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1971 and a PhD in cognitive science with an emphasis in linguistics from the University of California, Irvine in 1980. Crain was employed as a professor of linguistics at the University of Connecticut from 1986 to 1995. During that time he was also a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. After leaving UConn, he took a position as professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 1995 to 2003, before accepting a position as a professor of cognitive science at Macquarie in 2004, where he has remained since. He was deputy director of the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science from 2004 until 2010, and director of the Centre for Language Sciences from 2007 until 2010. He led the successful bid for an ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, which is funded from 2011 until 2017. Crain was awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship (2004–2009), and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (2006–current). He is currently the chair of the National Committee on Mind and Brain (Australian Academy of Science), and is a presidential nominee on the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee for the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Crain is a visiting professor at the Beijing Language and Culture University, China, and at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Japan. He was appointed Macquarie University Distinguished Professor in 2010. Crain is on the executive board of the Society for Language Development, the advisory board of Language Acquisition, and the editorial boards of Semantics and Pragmatics, the Journal of Child Language, Biolinguistics, and the Cambridge University Press, Linguistics Series. He has been invited to speak at over fifty international conferences. His recent research grants include an ARC Discovery grant to study the acquisition of logical words in English, Chinese and Japanese, an ARC LIEF grant to build the Southern Hemisphere's first MEG (magnetoencephalography) brain-imaging laboratory, and an ARC Linkage Industrial Partners grant (with the Kanazawa Institute of Technology and the Yokogawa Electric Corporation) to build the world's first MEG system designed for the study of language processing in preschool-aged children. For the last decade, Crain's research has focused on children's acquisition of semantic knowledge, in particular young children's knowledge of logical expressions. Much of this has been cross-linguistic research, with a particular focus on Mandarin Chinese. Some of Crain's recent work is summarized in a 2012 book, The Emergence of Meaning, published by Cambridge University Press.

References

External links Professor Stephen Crain's CCD web profile

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Stephen Crain

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Stephen Crain 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 Stephen Crain 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 Stephen Crain 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 Stephen Crain

In research: Stephen Crain 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 Stephen Crain 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: Stephen Crain is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Academic staff of Macquarie University, Australian cognitive scientists, Developmental psycholinguists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Stephen Crain 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 Stephen Crain in 20 minutes

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

Frequently asked questions

What is Stephen Crain in simple terms?

Why does Stephen Crain 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 Stephen Crain?

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 Stephen Crain.