Elman Prize
The 2021 Elman Prize winner has been selected and will be announced in January. The nomination cycle for the 2022 Elman Prize will take place next fall

Jeffrey L. Elman
The Cognitive Science Society is pleased to announce the launch of the Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building. In recognition of Jeff Elman’s many contributions to the field of cognitive science, the Cognitive Science Society in partnership with the University of California, San Diego will award a new prize at the Cognitive Science Society annual meeting to mid-career cognitive scientists (individuals or teams) whose careers exemplify the twin strands of scientific excellence, and commitment to community-building and service that were so evident in Jeff Elman’s career.
Award of the Jeffrey L. Elman Prize
The winner of the inaugural Elman Prize in 2020 was, Jenny Saffran. The 2021 Prize winner has been selected and will be announced in January. The 2022 Elman Prize nominations will open in the Fall of 2021.
Fundraising for the Endowment
The Cognitive Science Society in partnership with University of California, San Diego encourages donations to the Elman Prize endowment fund from colleagues and friends who wish to recognize and honor Jeff Elman and his notable contributions to cognitive science.
Contributions to the field of cognitive science
Scientific excellence
Jeffrey L. Elman made several major contributions to the theoretical foundations of human cognition, most notably in the areas of language and development. His work had, and continues to have, an immense impact across fields as diverse as cognitive science, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, computer science and linguistics. Among other honors he was awarded the Rumelhart Prize by the Cognitive Science Society in 2007.
Community building and service
In addition to the many important intellectual contributions Jeffrey Elman made to Cognitive Science, he also was an inspiring scientific citizen who is remembered for his generosity and mentorship. His community building and service were wide-ranging. In addition to serving as president of the Cognitive Science Society (1999-2000) and on its Governing Board for two terms (1994-2000; 2008-2012), he made many other contributions to the field. He contributed to the international presence of Cognitive Science, serving as Co-Director, Central and Eastern European Center for Cognitive Science, New Bulgarian University and advisor at National Taiwan University. He served extensively at the NIH in grant reviewing, serving on and later chairing the LCOM Study Section. And in addition to editing the journal Cognitive Science, he edited an influential monograph series at the MIT press and served on the editorial board of numerous journals.
Jeff Elman died of a heart attack on June 28, 2018. He was planning to attend CogSci 2018 to participate in a symposium on Event Predictive Cognition. At CogSci 2019 there was a symposium in his memory. In 2020 Jenny Saffran was the inaugural recipient of the Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building.
Elman Prize Selection Committee:
The Jeffrey L. Elman Prize is administered by the Prize Selection Committee under the direction of the Cognitive Science Society Governing Board. Screening of nominees and selection of the prize winner is performed by the Prize Selection Committee.
Nora Newcombe (Committee Chair)
Marta Kutas
Ken McRae
Andrea Bender
Mutsumi Imai
2020 Recipient

The recipient of the inaugural Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building is Jenny Saffran
The recipient of the inaugural Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building is Jenny Saffran. This honor will be celebrated at the CogSci 2020 conference in Toronto with a prize and dedicated symposium.
Biography
Jenny Saffran received her BA in cognitive science from Brown University, then completed a PhD in psychology at the University of Rochester with Elissa Newport and Richard Aslin. She has been on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1997. In 2005 she was appointed full professor and in 2018 she became the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor.
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Scientific Achievements
Jenny Saffran’s interests concern a seminal question in cognitive science: How do children acquire language? Acquiring language depends on a combination of innate structure and learning from experience. Saffran and her colleagues developed laboratory methods to study the experiential input to infant language learning to test specific theories about how learning unfolds. Her experimental research demonstrates, quite remarkably, that humans, including infants, acquire language by tracking statistical information available in the environment. For example, infants learn to segment words by relying on statistical probabilities. Across a language, the transitional probability from one sound to the next will generally be greatest when the two sounds follow one another within a word than across words, as when (in English) the sounds ‘preh’ and ‘tee’ are more likely to follow one another within a word (‘pretty’) than are the sounds ‘tee’ and bay’ (although they sometimes do, when we say, ‘pretty baby’).
At the same time, Saffran recognizes that even the most powerful learners are not blank slates, and has sought to delineate constraints on learning. Her experimental results suggest that learners can use statistical cues to acquire hierarchical phrase structure, an abstract component of linguistic syntax. In particular, she has demonstrated that some computations are favored over others, and that these constraints on learning are related to natural language structure. These results support the emerging perspective that, rather than evolving in a vacuum, human languages evolve to fit the human learner. By comparing statistical learning in linguistic versus nonlinguistic domains, her research offers a direct, innovative way to test the hypothesis that the uniqueness of human language resides in the nature of human learning and not in some specialized language-specific modules within the brain.
Community Building
Saffran is a community builder in her teaching, in her lab, at the University of Wisconsin, and for cognitive science. First, she has worked tirelessly to improve undergraduate students’ experiences at the university. For example, she developed an innovative peer-tutoring program in her large-enrollment Child Development class. Second, as leader of a very active and productive lab, she has built a supportive and nurturing community for training the next generation of scholars. Saffran encourages students to develop their own research questions and ideas, and she serves as a supportive guide along this path. Third, she plays a central role in her department and at her university. For example, she played a key role in the recent reorganization of the Language Sciences program at Wisconsin. Fourth, Saffran is a generous collaborator who has forged close ties with researchers who study developmental disorders, in an effort to understand the underlying causes of language delays and differences, she collaborates with researchers who study animal cognition, and has worked on methodological issues in infant research. In all aspects, Saffran advances the cognitive science community.
The Cognitive Science Society is pleased to announce the establishment of the CogSci Grove which aims to mobilise cognitive scientists to offset carbon emissions associated with their professional activities.