More broadly, they will address the two-way relationship between spatial cognition and language from the perspectives of global linguistic and cultural diversity, language acquisition and cognitive development, and the factors that contribute to difficulties in this domain for children on atypical developmental paths. The colloquium marks the initiation of the six-year international research project "The System of Shape Representations in Cognition, Development and Across Languages", funded by an ERC Synergy Grant ID: 101 167183.
Shape is a prominent feature of the visual world and determines how we perceive and store information about objects, how we interact with them, and what uses they can be put to. To give just a few examples, shape is richly encoded in the languages of the world by organizing object labels in terms of their shape (tall elongated objects, slim objects, round oval objects), as well as actions involving manipulating those objects which are encoded in verbs. For instance, while most European languages classify the world into just masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter genders, languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Amazonian Bora have special grammatical categories for round vs. flat vs. long objects. And in sign languages, shape prominently organizes the lexicon and grammar, with the hands representing visuo-geometric properties of real-world referents. During early language acquisition, children attend to shape as a vital cue for acquiring the label of objects. This process develops at the intersection between spatial ability skills and language, especially vocabulary size. But interestingly, children on atypical developmental trajectories tend to have problems in using this strategy for word learning. All of this suggests that there is a rich, and probably bi-directional relationship between the visual perception of shape and its representation in language.
Internal workshop for ERC SHAPE project members and collaborators (10-12 June)
This project-internal workshop brings together the members of the ERC SHAPE project and an international team of linguists that have agreed to collaborate with this project by collecting data in a range of field sites across the world. The aim of the workshop is to introduce the different tasks for data collection used in the project and to discuss scientific collaborations between project members and project collaborators.