Maya Hickmann
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Maya Hickmann (born 19 May 1953 in Egypt; died 26 September 2019) was a linguist who specialized in language acquisition and psycholinguistics.[1][2][3]
Born in Egypt, Hickmann spent her early life in Paris.[1] 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.[4] 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.[1][4]
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.[1][4] 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.[1][4] 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.[1][4]
In 2008 Hickman was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.[1][2] 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.[1]