Symposium on Language and Perception

The symposium will be held Monday, April 4, 2005, from 12:00-2:00 PM in the Dogwood Room of the Indiana Memorial Union.

Language has frequently been characterized as a system with terms that get their meaning solely from their relations to other terms within the same system. By this account, language is viewed as a closed system with little contact to the world. In contrast, there has been considerable recent interest in grounding language in human perceptual and motor systems, and also rekindling the notion that our perceptions and actions may be influenced by language. The three panelists in this symposium will disucss the bidirectional interactions between language and perception. Topics that will likely be covered include:

How does language affect what are normally considered to be lower-level perceptual and motor processes?
Is language best conceptualized as a symbolic system in which terms derive all of their meaning from their relations to one another?
How does the language we acquire augment our ability to represent, reason about, and computationally process our world?
How do our perceptual abilities shape language processes normally considered to be arbitrary or ungrounded?
How much of our language is perceptually grounded? How else can elements of our language get their meaning?
How are the various components of language (word meanings, sounds, and grammatical constructions) influenced by perceptual and action processes? How do these same components influence perceptual and conceptual processes?

Panelists
Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
Stevan Harnad, Canada Research Chair and Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal
Linda Smith, Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology, Indiana University

Organizer: Robert Goldstone

Sponsor: The Indiana University Cognitive Science Program

Schedule

12:00-12:30 - Lera Boroditsky, "From Perception to Language and Back Again
12:30-1:00 – Stevan Harnad, “How to Get Off the Chinese/Chinese Dictionary-Go-Round”
1:00-1:30 – Linda Smith, "On the inseparability of language and thought"
1:30-2:00 – open discussion

Symposium on Language and Perception

Panelists Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University Stevan Harnad, Canada Research Chair and Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal Linda Smith, Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology, Indiana University

Schedule

12:00-12:30 - Lera Boroditsky, "From Perception to Language and Back Again 12:30-1:00 – Stevan Harnad, “How to Get Off the Chinese/Chinese Dictionary-Go-Round” 1:00-1:30 – Linda Smith, "On the inseparability of language and thought" 1:30-2:00 – open discussion

Panelists
Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
Stevan Harnad, Canada Research Chair and Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal
Linda Smith, Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology, Indiana University

12:00-12:30 - Lera Boroditsky, "From Perception to Language and Back Again
12:30-1:00 – Stevan Harnad, “How to Get Off the Chinese/Chinese Dictionary-Go-Round”
1:00-1:30 – Linda Smith, "On the inseparability of language and thought"
1:30-2:00 – open discussion