Edward Gibson
PhD
Edward Gibson
PhD
Dr. Edward (Ted) Gibson, PhD, was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, in 1962. He completed his undergraduate studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he double-majored in mathematics and computer science. In 1984, he took time off to represent Canada in rowing at the Los Angeles Olympics, where he finished seventh in the coxless four event. He later competed in the 1985 World Rowing Championships, his final international race.
Following his athletic career, Dr. Gibson pursued graduate studies in language and cognition. He earned an M.Phil. in Computer Speech and Language Processing from the University of Cambridge in 1986 and a PhD in Computational Linguistics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991.
Dr. Gibson’s research focuses on the cognitive science of human language, including word meaning, sentence structure, and cross-linguistic variation. He primarily uses behavioral methods to understand how people produce and comprehend language, often through simple yet revealing experiments. His work extends beyond the lab and includes field research with two Indigenous groups in the Amazon: the Pirahã in Brazil, where he studied number cognition, and the Tsimane’ in Bolivia, where he investigated how people use and label color terms. Unlimited
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