[lingtalks] TODAY: Susan Goldin-Meadow (Linguistics Colloquium)
Klinton Bicknell
kbicknell at ling.ucsd.edu
Mon Feb 9 08:35:38 PST 2009
TODAY at 2pm, Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago; http://goldin-meadow-lab.uchicago.edu/
) will give a colloquium in the UCSD Linguistics Department, in AP&M
4301.
:: Abstract ::
Gesture's Role in Creating and Learning Language
Imagine a child who has never seen or heard any language at all.
Would such a child be able to invent a language on her own? Despite
what one might guess, the answer to this question is "yes". I
describe children who are congenitally deaf and cannot learn the
spoken language that surrounds them. In addition, they have not yet
been exposed to sign language, either by their hearing parents or
their oral schools. Nevertheless, the children use their hands to
communicate - they gesture - and those gestures take on many of the
forms and functions of language. The properties of language that we
find in the deaf children's gestures are just those properties that do
not need to be handed down from generation to generation, but can be
reinvented by a child de novo. They are the resilient properties of
language, properties that all children, deaf or hearing, come to
language-learning ready to develop.
In contrast to these deaf children who are inventing a language with
their hands, hearing children are learning language from a linguistic
model. But they too produce gestures. Indeed, young hearing children
often use gesture to communicate before they use words. Interestingly,
changes in a child's gestures not only predate but also predict
changes in the child's early language, suggesting that gesture may be
playing a role in the language-learning process. For example, gesture
could influence language-learning by eliciting from adults the kinds
of words and sentences that the child needs to hear in order to take
the next linguistic step. Gesture thus not only reflects the language-
learning stages through which a young child passes--it may play a role
in language-learning itself.
Gesture is versatile in form and function. Under certain
circumstances, gesture can substitute for speech, and when it does, it
embodies the resilient properties of language. Under other
circumstances, gesture can form a fully integrated system with speech
and can predict when and how a child will learn.
--
For further information about the Linguistics department colloquia
series, including the schedule of future events, please visit http://ling.ucsd.edu/events/colloquia.html
.
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