Schedule of Events

Spring 2008 Colloquium Series

Marcel Kinsbourne

New School for Social Research (Psychology)
Autism as a Disease: Neurobiological Evidence
BOUS 160
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
12:00 PM
Psychology Department Colloquium
Abstract

Prof. Kinsbourne is boarded in Pediatrics and Neurology, and has since 1995 been at the New School for Social Research. His research includes work on brain-behavior relations, consciousness, imitation, psychology of attention, attention deficit disorder, and autism.

Ken McRae

University of Western Ontario (Psychology)
How Knowledge of Real-world Events Influences Language Comprehension
BOUS 160 (The Liberman Room)
Friday, March 28, 2008
4:00 PM
Co-sponsored by the Cognitive Science Program and the Department of Psychology
Abstract

A significant proportion of everyday utterances concern real-word events. Thus, people's knowledge of everyday events, including their common participants, is an important component of language comprehension. In many theories of language comprehension, event knowledge is outside of "the lexicon", is accessed slowly, and influences comprehension only after an architecturally-determined time delay. In contrast, I present results from semantic priming and sentence comprehension studies that strongly support a view in which event knowledge is organized efficiently so that it is computed immediately from words (and combinations of words). In addition, our studies show that event knowledge is an important source of information that is used to generate expectancies about upcoming concepts and syntactic structure during on-line sentence comprehension.

Susan Goldin-Meadow

University of Chicago (Psychology)
Gesture's Role in Creating and Learning Language
BOUS 160 (The Liberman Room)
Friday, April 11, 2008
4:00 PM
Cognitive Science Colloquium
Abstract

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.

Jaegwon Kim

Brown University (Philosophy)
TBA
TBA
Friday, April 25, 2008
4:00 PM
Sponsored by the Philosophy Department graduate student assocation