Joint IJN/LSCP Seminar
One of the central issues in cognitive science is to understand the link between language and thought. This broad issue comes into a particularily interesting light when considered in view of early child development. Past research has highlighted that infants make considerable achievements in language acquisition during their first year of life. Children refine their ability to recognize the sound patterns of their native language, they also develop conceptual competence in several domains: numbers, physical objects, faces, etc. The question now becomes: In what ways do these two types of acquisition interact? Does the acquisition of the lexicon and syntax lead to the emergence of novel conceptual capacities? Or is conceptual maturation a prerequisite for the acquisition of word meaning? What is the relationship between core conceptual systems, present prelinguistically, and mature and linguistically embedded conceptual structure? The seminar will use a mixture of readings and invited lectures to trigger broad scale discussions and brainstorming on these issues. We will start by selecting a particular test case of language development: the case of the number system.
The number system has been studied extensively, both in terms of conceptual core components (the object indexing system, the analog magnitude system), its linguistic expression (development of counting), its formal properties (arithmetic), and its anthropological variation (cross cultural differences in numeration). Further sessions will explore other topics depending on the interests of the participants: this may include the acquistion of color concepts, linguistic gender and Whorfian effects, conception and grammatical expression of time and space, the acquisition of social concepts...
The seminar is open to students and researchers actively interested in these topics. Participants in this seminar will be invited to read, discuss and present papers/data during the seminar. We hope that you will join us and we look forward to an exciting year. |
home
