Anat Ninio

Anat Ninio (Hebrew: ענת ניניו‎‎; born August 10, 1944) is a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She specializes in the interactive context of language acquisition, the communicative functions of speech, pragmatic development, and syntactic development. Ninio is best known for her work on joint picture-book reading of parents and young children; for developing the widely used Ninio and Wheeler and INCA-A taxonomies of communicative acts; and for her work on syntactic development, combining learning theory with the Chomskyan Minimalist Program. She has published three books, and over a hundred peer-referenced papers, book chapters and conference presentations.

Ninio received a B.A. with majors in Statistics and English Linguistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1965, and an additional B.A. in Psychology in 1969, from the same university. As a graduate student, she studied cognitive psychology with Daniel Kahneman the future Nobel laureate, receiving an M.A. in 1970 and a Ph.D. in 1974, all from the Hebrew University. She spent a post-doctoral year at the University of Oxford in 1975/76 with Jerome Bruner, specializing in the social interactionist theory of language acquisition.

Ninio was appointed a lecturer in Psychology at the Hebrew University in 1976, was promoted to senior lecturer in 1982, to associate professor in 1989, and to full professor in 1994. She holds the endowed chair of Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor in Psychology at Hebrew University. She served in various administrative capacities at the Hebrew University, among them as the Chair of the Graduate Developmental Program, Chair of the Department of Psychology, Chair of the Sturman Human Development Center, and Director of the Martin and Vivian Levin Center for the Normal and Psychopathological Development of the Child and Adolescent. She also served as a visiting professor at Duke University, New York University, the New School for Social Research, New York, the University of Quebec at Montreal, Harvard University, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL).

...
Wikipedia