Dan Slobin

Dan Isaac Slobin is an American linguist and psychologist born May 7, 1939, in Detroit, Michigan, and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who earned his PhD in social psychology from Harvard University in 1964. His research on language acquisition demonstrated the importance of cross-linguistic comparison, showing that children learning different languages develop distinct patterns of comprehension based on their language structure, and he developed the concept of thinking for speaking, the idea that speakers internalize language-specific ways of organizing information about space and motion, described as a moderate contemporary version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. With Ruth Berman he created the frog-story project, using a wordless picture book to elicit comparable narratives across dozens of languages for cross-linguistic study of children narrative development.