Morten Christiansen, Cornell associate professor of psychology, has been awarded a 2005-06 Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Christiansen was selected from a pool of 161 scholars from 10 U.S. institutions for his project "Creating Language: Toward a Unified Framework for Language Acquisition, Processing and Evolution."

Funded through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ryskamp fellowships provide advanced assistant professors and untenured associate professors in the humanities and related social sciences with time and resources to pursue their research. The fellowships recognize those scholars whose contributions have advanced their fields and who have well-designed and carefully developed plans for new research. Christiansen is using his award to support a one-year sabbatical leave at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, during the 2006-07 academic year.

The Ryskamp fellowships are named for Charles A. Ryskamp, literary scholar, distinguished library and museum director, and long-serving trustee of the Mellon Foundation.