Cog Sci Speaker Series: The Origins of Language
Presenter: Dr. Annemarie Kocab
Title: The Origins of Language: Evidence from Nicaraguan Sign Language (LSN) and Homesign
Abstract: All human societies have languages capable of expressing the richness of human thought. To what extent is this achievement an historical accomplishment, similar to mathematics or science, and to what extent does it rely on our evolved cognitive capacities? My lab studies these questions by looking at language creation in different communities, including Nicaraguan Sign Language (a language only 50 years old) and homesign systems. I will present results on how a new language comes to have recursion and devices for marking event participants. In these cases, I find evidence for rapid emergence of linguistic structure within a few generations. One possible explanation for these findings is that features that emerge early are those that reflect underlying shared semantic structures that are universal (or nearly) in languages. In contrast, the features that emerge later (e.g., grammatical morphology) may be those that vary across languages and require convergence and iterated learning.
Bio: Dr. Kocab is an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns JHopkins University. She received a Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University and completed a postdoc at Harvard with Kate Davidson in Linguistics and Jesse Snedeker in Psychology. Her research seeks to understand what properties of the human mind give rise to language and how the structure of language reflects the structure of the mind.
Event Snapshot
When and Where
Who
Open to the Public
| Cost | FREE |
Interpreter Requested?
Yes