Stephen Crain

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.