PLENARY SPEAKERS
Plenary 1: Robots teach children with autism gestural communication skills: From theory to research and to practice
​Wednesday, July 13th 8:45am
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Catherine So is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Professor Susan Goldin-Meadow. Her research interests lie in the areas of developmental milestones of language and gestural communication skills in typically and atypically developing children. She is the Founder and Director of a social enterprise, Science and Technology for Autism Remediation (STAR Limited), which provides a robot-based intervention for autistic children called Robot for Autism Behavioral intervention (RABI). Her intervention won a silver medal in the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva 2022.
Plenary 2: The mind hidden in our hands
Wednesday, July 13th 1:15pm
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Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Comparative Human Development, and the Committee on Education, at the University of Chicago. She completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Rochel Gelman and Lila Gleitman. Her research focuses on the home-made gestures profoundly deaf children create when not exposed to sign language, and what they tell us about the fundamental properties of mind that shape language. She studies the gestures hearing speakers around the globe spontaneously produce when they talk, and what they tell us about how we talk and think. She has won mentoring and teaching awards from the University of Chicago and APA, has been President of the Association for Psychological Sciences, the Cognitive Development Society, the International Society for Gesture Studies, and Chair of the Cognitive Science Society. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the National Academy of Sciences.
Plenary 3: Understanding gestures
Thursday, July 14th 1:15pm
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Seana Coulson is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and is the UCSD Director of the Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders at UCSD and San Diego State University. As the P.I. in the Brain and Cognition Laboratory at UCSD, her research examines the cognitive and neural underpinnings of meaning construction. She is the author of Semantic Leaps (Cambridge University Press) and has published articles on conceptual blending, experimental pragmatics, figurative language comprehension, gesture comprehension, grounded cognition, and synesthesia. Current work in the lab is focused on artificial language learning, language change, motivated reasoning, and speech-gesture integration.
Plenary 4: What we learn by comparing sign language and gesture
Friday, July 15th 11:30am
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Diane Brentari is the Mary K. Werkman Professor of Linguistics and Co-director of the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1990. She was on the faculty of the University of California-Davis, and then led the Sign Language program at Purdue University before coming to the University of Chicago in 2011. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Pisa, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Göttingen. Dr. Brentari's research addresses issues in sign language grammars, particularly problems at the intersection of morphology, phonology, and prosody. In 2020, Brentari was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the project Observing the Creation of Language. She is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and an Associate Editor of the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Language. She has published five books on sign language and over 100 articles.
Plenary 5: Communication before language
Friday, July 15th 3:30pm
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Michael Tomasello is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and emeritus director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. His research focuses on processes of cooperation, communication, and cultural learning in human children and great apes. His books include Origins of Human Communication (MIT Press, 2008); Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009); A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014); A Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard University Press, 2016); Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Harvard University Press, 2019); and The Evolution of Agency (MIT Press, 2022).
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