Stephen Crain

Who is Stephen Crain?

Stephen Crain is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, 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. 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.