Bilingualism research group

Speaker: Mike Sharwood Smith (Heriot-Watt University)

Title: Understanding multimodal cognition in mono- and multi-linguals

Abstract: Human communication is carried out in different ways, only one of them via the medium of language. Much attention has been paid, from various sociological and psychological perspectives, to ways in which different categories of individual use different modalities to communicate meanings to others. It seems to be a good time to understand at a deeper level the cognitive processing underlying such communication and so not only in a more piecemeal manner by looking at particular individuals and selected aspects such as working memory in the context of an experimental study. This therefore means moving the spotlight onto how one mind, as a set of collaborating systems, uses all the cognitive resources at its disposal to communicate with another mind. This provides a good opportunity to apply the MCF (Modular Cognition Framework). In the process of doing so there will be a brief mention of some interesting primatological research showing what humans and their nearest relative, the chimpanzee actually have in common when it comes to communicating with their peers. This will in turn lead on to detailing how humans, that is both monolinguals and multilinguals on the one hand and on the other even the cleverest chimpanzee will differ, both qualitatively and quantitatively when it comes to multimodal communication. The cognitive system that will be placed centre stage in this account will not be the important system(s) responsible for building and activating linguistic (phonological and syntactic) structure for any language but rather the highly developed human conceptual system. This development, it is hypothesised, has arisen due to the synergy between the conceptual and linguistic systems.