Gesture in Language Development Across the Lifespan

Aliyah Morgenstern, PhD, is Professor of English linguistics and language acquisition at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her research is focused on multimodal interaction and language development, using ethnographic methods to capture ecological data. Dr. Morgenstern's current research projects intend to retrace children's pathways into multimodal language acquisition in a scaffolding interactional environment. She also works on typological and cultural differences in multimodal adult-child and adult-adult interactions in French, English, Russian, German, and French Sign Language. Dr. Morgenstern uses a plurisemiotic, multi-linguistic level approach, and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. 

Susan Goldin-Meadow, PhD, is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology and Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include language development and creation as well as gesture's role in communicating, thinking, and learning. Dr. Goldin-Meadow's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the March of Dimes, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke. She has served as a member of the language review panel for NIH, has been a Member-at-Large to the Section on Linguistics and Language Science in AAAS, and was part of the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development sponsored by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine and leading to the book Neurons to Neighborhoods. She is a Fellow of AAAS, APS, and APA (Divisions 3 and 7). in 2001, Dr. Goldin-Meadow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship which led to her two recently published books, Resilience of Language and Hearing Gesture. She is currently the President of the Cognitive Developmental Society and the editor of the new journal sponsored by the Society for Language Development, Language Learning and Development. Dr. Goldin-Meadow also serves as chair of the developmental area program.