Susan Goldin-Meadow - Research Interests

Research Interests

Goldin-Meadow’s experience at the Piagetian Institute in Geneva piqued her interest in the relation between language and thought. This interest continues to energize her research, which exploits the gestures that we produce with our hands to explore two fundamental questions.

(1) Which properties of language are so fundamental to human language that they will appear in a communication system developed by a child who does not have access to linguistic input? Goldin-Meadow studies this question by observing the home-made gestures, called homesigns, that profoundly deaf children create when they are not exposed to sign language. Homesign offers insight into the linguistic properties that are at the core of human language––properties that children are able to invent on their own, and that conventional sign languages are likely to have contained at the earliest stages of their creation.

(2) Can the gestures that hearing speakers produce when they talk play a role in learning, in particular, in the transition from an understanding that is grounded in movements in space to an understanding that is abstract and generalizable? The gestures that hearing speakers produce when they talk are robust––they appear in congenitally blind individuals, even when they talk to other blind individuals and even though they have never seen anyone gesture, and in deaf children who use sign language as their primary language. These co-speech gestures reflect a speaker’s thoughts, often thoughts that don’t appear in the speaker’s language (either sign or speech) and that the speaker doesn’t even know she has. But gesture can do more than reflect thought––it can play a role in changing thought, as part of the language learning process and, once language has been mastered, as part of the learning process that leads to the acquisition of other skills.