Biography
Skousen was born in Cleveland, Ohio to a Latter-day Saint (LDS or Mormon) family, and was one of ten children. He graduated from Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oregon. After his father's unexpected death from lung cancer in 1964, Skousen served as a missionary in Finland from 1965 to 1967. He is fluent in Finnish.
Skousen received his B.A. degree from BYU, with a major in English and a minor in mathematics. Skousen went on to study linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, there earning his Ph.D. degree in 1972. He was then an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin until 1979, when he joined the faculty of BYU. Skousen was also a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1981, a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tampere in Finland in 1982, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands in 2001. In 1999, BYU presented him the Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Research and Creative Arts Awards.
Since 1999, Skousen has served as the president of the Utah Association of Scholars, an affiliate of the National Association of Scholars. He has also been associate editor of the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics since 2003.
Read more about this topic: Royal Skousen
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