Nomination: Professor Heliana Mello, Faculty of Arts at UFMG
Period: August 17th to 28th, 2009
The central interest of Chris Sinha’s research is in the relationship between language, cognition and culture, with the main objective of his research being the integration of cognitive linguistics with sociocultural approaches to language and communication. The researcher has experience in experimental and field observation methods on human development. He was coordinator of the Language Acquisition and Cognition Network, funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (1997-2001). Chris Sinha was the principal investigator of the project “Cognition, Culture and Typology in Language Acquisition and Evolution”, funded by the European Science Foundation EUROCORES research program Origin of Man, Language and Languages (2002-2005); and leader of the “Stages in the Development and Evolution of Sign Use (SEDSU)” project at the University of Portsmouth, funded by the European Union through the “What It Means to Be Human” initiative (2005-2008).