Bob McMurray: Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology.

Abstract

Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Bob McMurray for pioneering research on speech and language processing in infants and adults. McMurray has conducted influential work on the graded nature of speech categories, demonstrating within-category sensitivity in the service of efficient processing and optimal cue integration during online comprehension. He has also applied a rigorous computational approach to learning and development, revealing the emergence of stable categories in the face of extraneous variability and the rapid growth of childhood vocabulary within the context of a parallel dynamic system. Finally, he has developed innovative eye-tracking methods to study category learning in normal infants and adults as well as the time course of language processing in special populations. McMurray's Award citation and a selected biblography are also presented here.