[lingtalks] Seyda Ozcaliskan Talk, Wednesday Feb. 21, 12pm
Steven Ford
sford at cogsci.ucsd.edu
Fri Feb 16 16:45:41 PST 2007
The UCSD Department of Cognitive Science is pleased to announce a talk by
Seyda Ozcaliskan Ph.D
University of Chicago, Department of Psychology
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 at 12pm
Cognitive Science Building Room 003
"From first words to first metaphors:
Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language learning"
ABSTRACT:
When people talk, they gesture. Even children, from the earliest stages of
language learning, use their hands when they speak. Research has made it
clear that gesture is integrated both temporally and semantically to the
speech it accompanies, and can convey substantive information not captured
by speech. As such, gesture offers insight into childrens conceptual
understanding of language before this understanding becomes explicit in
speech.
My research focuses on childrens earliest linguistic abilities and
examines whether precursors of these abilities can be found in childrens
gestures. More specifically, I examine whether and how gesture can inform
us about early language learning, from the onset of first words and first
sentences to the emergence of first metaphors. I approach this question
from a wide variety of angles by studying both typically- and
atypically-developing children, as well as children who are exposed to
structurally different languages.
Overall, my research places gesture at the cutting edge of early language
developmentgesture both presages oncoming changes in childrens speech and
also serves as a forerunner of linguistic advances. My future work will
examine how robust gestures contribution to language learning is across
different populations and different languages.
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