Obituary: Jacques Mehler
With great sadness we learned that Jacques Mehler has passed away on 11 February 2020 at the age of 83. Mehler was a pioneer of cognitive science, together with scholars like Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and George Miller. He was Emeritus at the 脡cole des Hautes 脡tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and director of the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique. From 2001, he was the head of the Language, Cognition and Development lab at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste. Utrecht 木瓜福利影视 awarded an honorary degree to Jacques Mehler in 2010, at which occasion Martin Everaert spoke a laudatio, from which we excerpt the following:
鈥淯trecht 木瓜福利影视 has several reasons to honor Jacques Mehler. Our approach to the study of language is greatly indebted to Mehler's pioneering work on human cognition. We share his view of language as an integral part of cognition, which implies that we study the mental representations of language as these interface with general and specific cognitive factors that constrain the processing of language.鈥
鈥淎 second reason for honoring Jacques Mehler is somewhat more specific: language acquisition happens to be a major area of research at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics. [鈥 Back in the 1960's, Jacques Mehler understood that a major theme in the study of early language acquisition should be to define the role of non-language-specific cues in the acquisition process, as well as how cues from one domain, for example prosodic cues, might assist the acquisition of knowledge in other domains, such as the lexicon or morpho-syntax. He was among the first cognitive scientists who started to study infant language acquisition from this vantage point back when he founded one of the first infant language acquisition laboratories in the world at the 脡cole des hautes 茅tudes en sciences sociales in Paris. The Utrecht babylab [鈥 was founded on premises that were first articulated by Jacques Mehler and others.鈥
鈥淚t is thanks to the work of people like Jacques Mehler that today we can answer this question in a positive way. The study of mind has become a part of the natural sciences.鈥
Ren茅 Kager
Research director, Utrecht institute of Linguistics