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Erica Cartmill Kensy Cooperrider Natasha Abner
Liesje Spaepen

Dr. Erica Cartmill

My research interests center on the evolution of language and the cognitive antecedents to language. I am particularly interested in the relationship between gestural and vocal communication on both evolutionary and ontogenetic timelines. My current work explores the relationship between gesture and speech in child language acquisition, and examines the role gesture plays as language moves beyond the 2-word stage and complex grammatical constructions begin to emerge. My previous research involved the study of gestural communication and social cognition in orangutans. By combining results from both lines of inquiry, I hope to identify cognitive and communicative structures that exist prior to the development of full-blown language.

email: cartmill@uchicago.edu

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Dr. Kensy Cooperrider

I am interested in the interplay of language, body, and culture in human cognition and communication. Co-speech gestures are my window of choice into this interplay. In previous work I have focused on: 1) how gestures and spoken language are co-organized at different levels of analysis, from the micro-level of the single word to the macro-level of discourse structure; and 2) what gestures can tell us about culturally variable and universal aspects of conceptualization, both in concrete domains like space and in abstract domains like time. A new line of work examines the role of gesture in reasoning and learning. Is gesture an engine of conceptual change and, if so, by what mechanisms?

email: kensy@uchicago.edu

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Dr. Natasha Abner

My research focuses on the grammatical patterns of human language and the commonalities and differences across grammatical patterns as they are manifested in signed and spoken language. My previous research focused on documentation and linguistic analysis of American Sign Language. My current research investigates the development of home sign systems and emergent sign languages as a means of understanding universal patterns in language development and also the origins of sign-specific linguistic properties. I am also interested in how gesture, broadly construed, and language interact as components of the communicative system across language modalities.

email: nabner@uchicago.edu

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Dr. Lilia Rissman

I investigate how language functions as a filter on the world: the tree outside my window is growing and blooming, at the same time that it is living, standing and providing shade. Each of these verbs constitutes a distinct semantic bundle: I am interested in understanding what bundles are possible in human language and how children learn these bundles. I am particularly interested how languages encode concepts of agency: meanings related to causation, goals and instrument use. I investigate these questions through psycholinguistic experiments with adults and children and formal semantic analysis. I have recently begun to address how such concepts are encoded in gesture and in homesign.

email: lrissman@uchicago.edu


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