在英国伦敦召开的第39届国际认知科学学会年会 (39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)传来好消息：南京师范大学讲席教授 MichaelTanenhaus博士获得该学会的David E. Rumelhart奖。该奖项是国际认知科学领域的最高学术荣誉。自2000年设立以来，国际认知科学学会每年通过评审委员会严格筛选，推举一位对现代认知科学理论做出卓越贡献的科学家进行特别奖励。
MichaelTanenhaus教授于美国哥伦比亚大学获得认知心理学的博士学位，目前是美国罗彻斯特大学脑与认知科学学系BeverlyPetterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop 教授，同时担任美国艺术与科学院院士（Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2011），美国科学促进会会士（Fellow, American Association for the Advancement ofScience)，国际认知科学学会会士（Fellow, Cognitive Science Society), 美国心理科学协会会士（Fellow, Association for Psychological Science)等学术职务。他是罗彻斯特大学语言科学中心的创建者之一，担任该中心主任20余年。该中心受美国国立卫生研究院资助，培养了一大批跨学科（心理学、语言学、神经科学、计算机科学）的语言科学人才，目前是世界知名的语言科学研究中心之一。
Tanenhaus在长达40余年的学术生涯中，结合理论建构，实证研究以及计算建模的方法，对人类语言理解与交际方面做出了杰出贡献。他的研究指出，语言理解由目标驱动并存在高度交互性。人们的口语理解不是一个单向封闭的过程，随着语流的逐步展开，人们对于语言各个层级的信息的处理（例如语音、词汇、句法以及语义信息）不仅受到到自上而下的高级认知信息的调控（例如交际目标和交际环境），同时也受到自下而上的精细知觉信息的影响。Tanenhaus在语言方面研究得益于其他认知科学领域研究的启发，其研究成果也对这些领域的发展产生了深远影响，例如视知觉、注意、表征、社会-语用交互。他也一直致力于沟通理论语言学和计算语言学两个领域，其成果涉及词汇语法、音素编码，韵律以及语用学各个方面。Tanenhaus培养了大批相关领域的优秀人才，他们在世界一流的心理系，语言学系以及脑与认知科学系开展科学研究或任教，其学术贡献深深影响语言科学研究的多个领域。
2015年，心理学院非常荣幸邀请MichaelTanenhaus担任南京师范大学讲席教授。在我校工作期间，Tanenhaus教授能够积极参与我校认知科学学科发展，特别是认真指导心理学院的老师与研究生开展前沿探索与研究，在心理语言学，特别是在有关汉语特色研究方面，已取得了可喜成果。我们相信Tanenhaus的加入和实际工作对于提升我校在国际认知科学领域的国际声誉以及在心理学等相关学科的前沿研究产生深远影响。
国际认知科学学会网站报道链接：
The 2018 David E. Rumelhart Prize Recipient: Michael Tanenhaus
The recipient of the eighteenth David E. Rumelhart Prize is MichaelTanenhaus, who over the course of 40 years gradually transformed ourunderstanding of human language and its relation to perception, action andcommunication. Tanenhaus is the Beverly Petterson Bishop and CharlesW. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University ofRochester. Tanenhaus also has alimited appointment as Chair Professor in the School of Psychology atNanjing Normal University. He was a founding member andserved as Director of the Center for Language Sciences and the PI for center’sNIH-supported interdisciplinary training program for twenty years. He receivedan undergraduate degree in Speech and Hearing Science from University ofIowa and PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Columbia.
Through ingenious theory development, experimentation, and computationalmodeling, Tanenhaus has shown that language comprehension is goal-directed andhighly interactive. As we hear a sentence unfold, our interpretation at eachlevel–phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic–is affected by ourhigher level knowledge (such as our goals and understanding of the situation)and by fine-grained information from perception that has been passed up theprocessing chain. His work on language both informs and is informedby other aspects of cognition, including visual and auditory perception,attention, representation, and social-pragmatic interaction. Throughout hiscareer he has engaged in a two-way dialog with formal and computationallinguistics – through work on lexicalized grammars, phonemic encoding,prosody and, most recently, pragmatics.
The breadth of Tanenhaus’ thinking, combined with his uncanny experimentalskills, have inspired a new generation of researchers to take a fresh look atwhat it means to communicate. His impact has been amplified by his formerstudents who have taken his insights and applied them to newquestions at psychology, linguistics and cognitive science departments aroundthe world.
