Born in Egypt, Hickmann spent her early life in Paris.[1] She studied in the US, obtaining first a BA in psychology at Cornell University in 1973, then an MA from the University of Chicago in 1975.[4] Her PhD, awarded in 1982 by the same institution, dealt with the development of children's narrative skills and discourse cohesion, and was supervised by David McNeill.[1][4]
In 2008 Hickman was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.[1][2] In the same year she founded the journal Language, Interaction and Acquisition, building on the existing journal Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère (Acquisition and Interaction in a Foreign Language; AILE) set up by Perdue.[1]
Research
Hickmann's research took an experimental approach to big questions in psycholinguistics and language acquisition, especially acquisition by multilingual children. She was particularly interested in the development of discourse structure, and maintained research interests in linguistic typology and linguistic universals.[1][2][3] She worked with both typically and atypically developing populations, and her work on the development of motion expressions and spatial expressions has been particularly influential.[1]
Selected publications
Kail, Michèle, and Maya Hickmann. 1992. French children's ability to introduce referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge. First Language 12 (34), 73–94. doi:10.1177/014272379201203405
Hickmann, Maya. 1996. Discourse Organization and the Development of Reference to Person, Space, and Time. In Paul Fletcher & Brian MacWhinney (eds.), The Handbook of Child Language, 194–218. Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1111/b.9780631203124.1996.00008.x
Hickmann, Maya, Henriëtte Hendriks, Françoise Roland and James Liang. 1996. The marking of new information in children's narratives: a comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language 23 (3), 591–619. doi:10.1017/S0305000900008965
Hickmann, Maya, and Henriëtte Hendriks. 1999. Cohesion and anaphora in children's narratives: A comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language 26 (2), 419–452. doi:10.1017/S0305000999003785
Hickmann, Maya. 2002. Children's discourse: person, space and time across languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9781139435147
References
12345678910Benazzo, Sandra; Gullberg, Marianne; Hendriks, Henriëtte; Véronique, Daniel; Blondel, Marion; Wauquier, Sophie; Cohen, Dana (2020). "In Memoriam Maya Hickmann". Language, Interaction and Acquisition. 11 (1): 1–3. doi:10.1075/lia.00004.mem. Retrieved 3 Aug 2024.
