Professor of Psychology, Professor of Linguistics, Research Scientist, English Language Institute
Ph.D. University of Wales
Area: Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental

Contact Information

Email: ncellis@umich.edu
Psychology Office: 3215 East Hall
Psychology Phone: 734-764-0426

Research and Teaching Interests

His research interests include language acquisition, cognition, emergentism, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and psycholinguistics. His research in second language acquisition concerns (1) explicit and implicit language learning and their interface, (2) usage-based acquisition and the probabilistic tuning of the system, (3) vocabulary and phraseology, and (4) learned attention and language transfer. His emergentist research concerns include language as a complex adaptive system, networks analysis of language, scale-free linguistic distributions and robust learning, and computational modeling. Two recent books on these themes are: Language as a Complex Adaptive System (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, with Diane Larsen-Freeman), and Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (Routledge, 2008, with Peter Robinson). He is General Editor of Language Learning.

Representative Publications

• Ellis, N. C. (2002). Frequency effects in language acquisition: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 143-188.
• Ellis, N. C. & Larsen-Freeman, D. (Eds). (2006). Language Emergence: Implications for Applied Linguistics. (Special issue). Applied Linguistics, 27(4).
• ‘The Five Graces Group’ (Beckner, C., Blythe, R., Bybee, J., Christiansen, M. H., Croft, W., Ellis, N. C., Holland, J., Ke, J., Larsen-Freeman, D., Schoenemann, T.) (2009). Language is a complex adaptive system. Position paper, Language Learning, 59, Supplement 1, 1-27.
• Ellis, N. C. & Sagarra, N. (2010). The bounds of adult language acquisition: Blocking and learned attention. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32, 553-580.

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