Interview with Michael Tomasello

Abstract

Michael Tomasello is an American psychologist and language researcher who is currently a Professor at the Psychology and Neuroscience department at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. He is also director emeriti of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He has dedicated part of his career, especially its beginning, to stablishing his sociocognitive theory about the acquisition of human language, differentiating it from other forms of animal communication.

After conducting hundreds of experiments with both primates and children, he comes to the concept about the ontogenetic evolution that was presented, first, in his book 'The Natural History of Human Thought', and more recently improved this and other concepts in the book ‘Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny’. His ideas re-signified the studies in language acquisition and social psychology, in addition to being the theoretical basis for numerous studies developed in several reference centers in language acquisition in Brazil and in several other parts of the world.

The concepts elaborated and discussed by Tomasello go beyond the acquisition of language and permeate questions that many researchers have already asked: despite having around 99% of genetic material similar to that of chimpanzees, why was only human beings capable of developing abilities to build extremely complex technological artifacts in a relatively short time from the point of view of species evolution?

            These and other issues are debated in this exclusive interview Michael Tomasello talks about his contribution in the field of language acquisition and the concepts developed by him through decades of studies and experiments with both children and chimpanzees. The psychologist also details about the ratchet effect hypothesis in human development that brings an explanation for the understanding of ontogenetic bases and presents his trajectory and contributions to research in this area.

The empirical work carried out by Michael directly contributes to the state of the art in in sociocognition studies, language acquisition and human development, from an ontogenetic perspective, thus creating the bases for a Socio-Pragmatic Theory of language acquisition, in opposition to the innatist theory of his contemporary and also a scholar of the subject, Noam Chomsky.

Furthermore, Tomasello explains his view on the development of socio-cognitive capabilities through shared intentionality, another concept that he explains in the interview. At the end, the psychologist says he is very satisfied when he sees that in Brazil there are several laboratories in which people are developing research based on his theory. Despite the importance of his concepts in the acquisition area, most of his books and articles are in English. For this reason, we decided to translate the interview in order to make it more accessible to researchers whose first language is Portuguese or Spanish.