Julien completed his undergraduate education at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. In 1993, he was awarded an Erasmus fellowship and spent a year at the University of North Wales, Bangor, in the United Kingdom, where we he was enrolled in the masters program in theoretical linguistics. The following year, Julien moved to the United States to work on his Ph.D. which he received from the University of Maryland in 1998. Upon completion of his doctoral work, Julien was awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania where he worked at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. This was followed by the award of a three year National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Julien was offered his first faculty position in 2001 and served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University. He received tenure in 2007. The same year, he was offered a tenured faculty position at Rutgers University where he currently holds a dual appointment in the Psychology Department and the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science.

Research

As a cognitive scientist, Julien is interested in two broad sets of questions. The first, and most recent, has to do with religious thought and behavior. Both are quintessential human traits, present in all modern cultures, and evident in archeology from all periods of human history and pre-history. Today, religion represents one of the most ubiquitous forces shaping people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. It would indeed be difficult to make sense of most of human existence, including culture, politics, law, morality, and war, without an appreciation of what religion is and how it works. Within the last few decades, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, and neuroscientists working under the banner of what has come to be called The Cognitive Science of Religion have joined forces in an effort to try to understand how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts and practices.

Since the beginning of his academic career, Julien has also been interested in our capacity to acquire language, to reason, and to think critically. This work, based on Julien’s training in theoretical linguistics, cognitive/developmental psychology, and speech-language pathology, takes an interdisciplinary approach and integrates concepts, methods, and experimental techniques from these different fields. The goal of this work is to understand how these capacities are acquired, represented, and put to use by both typical and atypical populations of human beings.

Representative Publications

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Han C. H., Lidz, J., and Musolino, J. (2016). Endogenous Sources of Variability in Language Acquisition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition 10.1073/pnas.1517094113
Musolino, J. and Landau, B. (2012). Genes, Language, and the Nature of Scientific Explanations: the Case of Williams Syndrome. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 29 (1-2), 123-148.
Musolino, J., Chunyo, G., and B. Landau (2010). Uncovering knowledge of core syntactic and semantic principles in individuals with Williams Syndrome. Language Learning and Development, 6(2), 126-161.
Musolino, J. (2009). The Logical Syntax of Number Words: Theory, Acquisition and Processing. Cognition, 111(1), 24-45.
Han, C.H., Lidz, J. and Musolino, J. (2007). Verb-raising and Grammar Competition in Korean: Evidence from Negation and Quantifier Scope. Linguistic Inquiry, 38(1), 1-47.
Musolino, J. (2006). On the Semantics of the Subset Principle. Language Learning and Development, 2(3), 195-218.
Musolino, J. (2004). The semantics and acquisition of number words: integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives. Cognition 93(1), 1-41.
Lidz, J. and Musolino, J. (2002). Children’s Command of Quantification. Cognition 84(2), 113-154.