Friday, October 6

4pm

Room: Oak 109

Barbara Landau, Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins will give a lecture on:

Origins and development of spatial language: Some complexities

The acquisition of spatial language has historically provided a fertile test-bed for theories of language-thought relationships. Does spatial language emerge driven by pre-linguistic spatial concepts, or does it emerge strictly as a function of the linguistic input provided in the environment? In this talk, I’ll consider challenges to both of these positions, focusing on the challenge of accounting for the linguistic combinatorics that are inherent in spatial language. Acknowledging the complexities of the mapping between spatial language and underlying concepts forces us to abandon simplistic hypotheses and to think about learning in new and more subtle ways.

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