NEW HAVEN, CT— The 2009 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held in Chicago in February included a session called “Embodied Language and Cognition: Brains, Mouths, and Hands.” This symposium featured the work of Haskins Laboratories senior scientist, Louis Goldstein, who is also a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. The session also included work by David Poeppel of the University of Maryland and New York University and Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago. It was organized and moderated by Philip Rubin, CEO and a senior scientist at Haskins, who provided an introductory overview of embodied language and cognition. Rubin is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Surgery, Otolaryngology, at the Yale University School of Medicine and a research affiliate in Psychology.
How people think, communicate, and interact with each other is shaped in part by biological heritage and its evolution. This symposium explored aspects of the emerging area of embodied language and cognition. Building on a long tradition of understanding the biological bases of language, the panel provided three contemporary approaches in which aspects of physicality are crucial to both methodology and theory. The presentations spanned the range of physiological space, from the neural level of the functional organization of speech processing in the brain, through the biomechanical and gestural levels of speech articulation, signing, and situated communicative interactions.
Louis Goldstein’s presentation, “An Embodied Theory of Syllabic Organization of Speech,” demonstrated how the organization of phonetic units into syllables has played a fundamental role in the description of many linguistic generalizations about sound structure, including linguistic universals. Despite this, there have been surprisingly few attempts to explain the emergence of syllable structure in language in a way that can account for these generalizations. Goldstein described a recent approach to this problem in which syllable structure is grounded in a coupled oscillator theory of coordinating the timing of multiple body actions.
David Poeppel’s presentation, “A Brain's-Eye View on Language: Neurobiological Foundations of Comprehension,” examined the complexities of neurolinguistic research and how they may be fruitfully addressed by adopting a computational perspective. Susan Goldin-Meadow, in a talk titled “Using our Bodies to Change Our Minds,” described a new study whose results revealed that children who convey more meanings with gestures at age 14 months have much larger vocabularies at 54 months and are thus better prepared for school than children who convey fewer meanings via gesture.
Haskins Laboratories was founded in 1935 by the late Dr. Caryl P. Haskins. This independent research institute has been in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970 when it formalized affiliations with Yale University and the University of Connecticut. The Laboratories' primary research focus is on the science of the spoken and written word.
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