[lingtalks] TODAY: Susan Goldin-Meadow (Linguistics Colloquium)

[Klinton Bicknell]

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 
  .