33.520, FYI: On Linguistics (Online talk)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-520. Thu Feb 10 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.520, FYI: On Linguistics (Online talk)

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Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 22:57:23
From: Ademir Veroneze [ademir.veroneze at letras.ufrj.br]
Subject: On Linguistics (Online talk)

 
Talk of the event On Linguistics, organized by the Graduation Program in
Linguistics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The speaker is
Professor Marina Bedny (Johns Hopkins University) and the mediator is
Professor Marije Soto (UFRJ).

Talk URL:
https://youtu.be/6ZvQhcYyI_E

Abstract: 
What enables humans to develop a shared repertoire of rich conceptual
representations and at the same time adapt to environments as diverse as the
Amazonian rainforest and New York City? I will discuss insights into this
puzzle from studies with people who are blind and studies of cultural
expertise. Theories of development often favor either general purpose, bottom
up learning or specialized, domain specific knowledge systems. I will argue
that the blissful union of specificity and flexibility makes humans uniquely
powerful and adaptive learners.

British empiricists argued that concepts or ‘ideas’ are built bottom up from
sensory primitives. Contrary to this view, we find that people born blind
acquire rich ‘visual' knowledge (e.g. of color and light) that is similar to
that of sighted adults. In people born blind, so called 'sensory’ knowledge is
constructed through inferential learning and linguistic communication. In
contrast to these preserved conceptual representations, blindness dramatically
reorganizes cortical systems that evolved for visual perception. Most theories
of plasticity assume that ‘visual’ cortices perform vision-like functions in
blindness (e.g., localization in space). On the contrary, we find that
’visual’ cortices of people born blind participate in higher-cognitive
functions, including language and symbolic math. This evidence suggests that
human cortex is cognitively pluripotent early in life.

Blindness is only one of the many possible variations in human experience. In
the last part of the talk I will discuss examples of how the human brain
accommodates cultural expertise. First, our recent studies with Braille
readers suggest that there isn’t a universal neural solution for reading
across modalities, rather Braille recruits unique parietal mechanisms distinct
from visual print. Finally, I will present evidence from Python coders that
highlights the importance of domain general mechanisms for acquiring new
cultural symbol systems, like computer coding. The human brain combines
specialization and flexibility to enable unprecedented learning capabilities.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Psycholinguistics





 



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