Mercator Fellows

Philippe Schlenker

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Prof. Dr. Philippe Schlenker
(Mercator Fellow 2023)

CNRS (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris)
& New York University
philippe.schlenker@gmail.com

Philippe Schlenker is a senior researcher at CNRS (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris) and a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. He was educated at École Normale Supérieure (Paris), and obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from EHESS (Paris). He has taught at École Normale Supérieure, Paris, at the University of Southern California, at UCLA, and, since 2008, at NYU. P. Schlenker’s early interests included semantics, pragmatics, the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. He has conducted research on indexicals and indirect discourse, intensional semantics, anaphora, presuppositions, as well as semantic paradoxes. In recent work, he has advocated a program of ‘Super Semantics’ that seeks to expand the traditional frontiers of the field. He has investigated the semantics of sign languages, with special attention both to their logical structure and to the rich iconic means that interact with it. In order to have a point of comparison for these iconic phenomena, P. Schlenker has also investigated the logic and typology of gestures in spoken language. In collaborative work with primatologists and psycholinguists, he has laid the groundwork for a ‘primate semantics’ that seeks to apply the general methods of formal linguistics to primate vocalizations. And in recent research, he has advocated the development of a detailed semantics for music, albeit one that is very different from linguistic semantics.

Selected publications

  • Signs: Schlenker and Lamberton: 2022, Meaningful Blurs: the Sources of Repetition-based Plurals in ASL. Linguistics & Philosophy 45: 201–264
  • Gestures: Schlenker: 2020, Gestural Grammar. Nat. Language & Ling. Theory 38:887–936
  • Signs and gestures: Schlenker; Bonnet, Marion; Lamberton, Jonathan; Lamberton, Jason; Chemla, Emmanuel; Santoro, Mirko; Geraci, Carlo: accepted with minor revisions, Iconic Syntax: Sign Language Classifier Predicates and Gesture Sequences. Linguistics & Philosophy
  • Primates: Schlenker, Chemla, et al.: 2016, Formal Monkey Linguistics. Theoret. Linguistics 42,1-2:1–90
  • Music: Schlenker: 2022, Musical Meaning within Super Semantics. Ling. & Philosophy 45:795–872.

Susan Goldin-Meadow

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Prof. Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow
(Mercator Fellow 2024)

University of Chicago
sgsg@uchicago.edu

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. While at Smith College during her undergraduate days, she spent her junior year at the Piagetian Institute in Geneva, which set the course of her academic career. 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; and on 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 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 the National Academy of Sciences.

Selected publications

  • Goldin-Meadow, S. (2023) Thinking with your hands: The surprising science behind how gestures shape our thoughts. New York, New York: Basic Books.
  • Novack, M., Brentari, D., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Waxman, S. (2021). Sign language, like spoken language, promotes object categorization in young hearing infants. Cognition, (Vol. 215). Elsevier BV.
  • Wakefield, E., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2021). How gesture helps learning: Exploring the benefits of gesture within an embodied framework. In S. Stolz (ed.), The body, embodiment, and education: An interdisciplinary approach. Routledge.
  • Goldin-Meadow, S. The resilience of language: What gesture creation in deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. N.Y.: Psychology Press (a subsidiary of Taylor & Francis), 2003.
  • Goldin-Meadow, S. Hearing gesture: How our hands help us think. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Sotaro Kita

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Prof. Dr. Sotaro Kita
(Mercator Fellow 2025)

University of Warwick
S.Kita@warwick.ac.uk

Sotaro Kita is Professor of Psychology of Language at the University of Warwick, in the UK. After a bachelor’s degree in mathematical engineering and a master’s degree in information engineering from University of Tokyo. He obtained a PhD in linguistics and psychology from the University of Chicago. Immediately after his PhD, he laid a foundation for gesture research in Nijmegen; he established and led the “Gesture Project” at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Netherlands, from 1993 to 2003. Then, he held a faculty position at University of Bristol and University of Birmingham, before joining University of Warwick. He served as the President of the International Society of Gesture Studies and also as the Editor of the journal, GESTURE.  His research primarily concerns the interplay among gesture, language and cognition.

He played a key role in establishing research on gesture as an important part of psycholinguistics.  He has investigated how gesture relates to various aspects of language: motion events (Kita & Özyürek, 2003, Journal of Memory and Language), metaphor (Argyriou, Mohr & Kita, 2017, JEP: Learning, Memory and Cognition), and discourse contexts (Friz, Kita, Littlemore, & Krott, 2021, Journal of Memory and Language). He has also investigated how gesture varies cross-culturally (Kita, 2009, Language and Cognitive Processes), and how gesture production shapes gesturer’s conceptualization for speaking and thinking (Kita, Alibali, & Chu, 2017, Psychological Review).

He has also investigated the role of gesture in language development and spatial cognition. For example, he showed that deaf Nicaraguan children turned gesture into an emerging sign language (Senghas, Kita & Özyürek, 2004, Science) and that children learn a novel word better when they see an adult’s gesture depicting the word referent (Aussems & Kita, 2021, Child Development).  He also showed that gesture production facilitates spatial cognition (Chu & Kita, 2011, JEP: General). 

Selected publications

  • Aussems, S., & Kita, S. (2021). Seeing iconic gesture promotes first- and second-order verb generalization in preschoolers. Child Development, 92(1), 124-141. https://dx.doi/org/10.1111/cdev.13392
  • Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2011). The nature of gestures’ beneficial role in spatial problem solving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(1), 102-115. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021790 
  • Fritz, I., Kita, S., Littlemore, J., & Krott, A. (2021). Multimodal language processing: How preceding discourse constrains gesture interpretation and affects gesture integration when gestures do not synchronise with semantic affiliates. Journal of Memory and Language, 117, 104191. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104191
  • Kita, S., Alibali, M. W., & Chu, M. (2017). How do gestures influence thinking and speaking? The gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis. Psychological Review, 124(3), 245-266. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000059
  • Kita, S., Alibali, M. W., & Chu, M. (2017). How do gestures influence thinking and speaking? The gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis. Psychological Review, 124(3), 245-266. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000059
  • Kita, S., & Emmorey, K. (2023). Gesture links language and cognition for spoken and signed languages. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2, 407-420.
  • Kita, S., & Özyürek, A. (2003). What does cross-linguistic variation in semantic coordination of speech and gesture reveal?: Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and speaking. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 16-32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00505-3