Nick Ellis
Nick C. Ellis is a Welsh psycholinguist, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, and one of the architects of the usage-based turn in SLA. Oxford-trained (BA Psychology, Corpus Christi, 1974), he spent 1978 to 2004 at Bangor before moving to Michigan, where he ran a research programme that turned frequency, chunking, and associative learning into a workable account of how learners come to know a second language.
The CREED slogan captures the position: language learning is Construction-based, Rational, Exemplar-based, Emergent, and Dialectic. The same statistical and associative mechanisms that underwrite general cognition do the work, and grammatical structure emerges from the tracking of form-meaning contingencies across countless encounters. The 2009 Language as a Complex Adaptive System position paper (with Diane Larsen-Freeman and colleagues) is the public-facing version of the argument, and his 2019 Modern Language Journal piece "Essentials of a Theory of Language Cognition" is the compressed statement.
Career
- BA, Oxford, 1974
- Bangor University, 1978–2004
- University of Michigan, 2004 onward; now Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics
- Editor in Chief of Language Learning, 1998–2002; General Editor 2006–2020
- AAAL Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award (2019)
Published Work
- "Frequency effects in language processing" (2002) — the field's default citation on frequency
- "Language as a Complex Adaptive System" position paper, Language Learning (2009)
- "Essentials of a Theory of Language Cognition," Modern Language Journal (2019)
- Edited volumes on usage-based SLA, construction learning, and corpus-driven accounts of L2 development
Influence
- The most influential English-language advocate of usage-based SLA
- A long tenure editing Language Learning that shaped what counted as publishable psycholinguistic SLA for two decades
- Set up much of the empirical groundwork on frequency, contingency, and salience that critics of UG-based SLA now take for granted