Susan M. Ervin-Tripp


Susan Moore Ervin-Tripp was an American linguist whose psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research focused on the relation between language use and the development of linguistic forms, especially the developmental changes and structure of interpersonal talk among children.

Biography

Born Susan Moore Ervin on June 29, 1927, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she earned her undergraduate degree in Art History at Vassar College. She earned a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1955 for thesis entitled, The Verbal Behaviour of Bilinguals: The Effect of Language of Report upon the Thematic Apperception Test Stories of Adult French Bilinguals, under the supervision of Theodore Newcomb. She taught at the University of California at Berkeley. In her academic work she conducted research on child language acquisition and bilingualism among children and has made contributions to the fields of linguistics, psychology, child development, sociology, anthropology, rhetoric, and women's studies.
She was a doctoral advisor of Daniel Kahneman, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner.
Ervin-Tripp was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1974.
A festschrift dedicated to Ervin-Tripp was published in 1996.
A tribute to the work of Susan Ervin-Tripp with a comprehensive bibliography was published by A. Kyratzis in 2020.

Selected publications