Susan J. Goldin-Meadow
The University of Chicago
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Primary Section: 52, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2020)
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Biosketch
Goldin-Meadow is the Bearsdley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and a member of the Department of Psychology, the Department of Comparative Human Development, and the Committee on Education. She has been President of the Section on Linguistics and Language Science in AAAS and is currently Past President of the Section on Psychology. She served as President of the Cognitive Development Society, the International Society for Gesture Studies, and the Cognitive Science Society, and President of the Association for Psychological Science. She is a Fellow of AAAS, APS, APA (Divisions 3 and 7), Cognitive Science Society, Linguistic Society of America, Society of Experimental Psychologists, and Psychonomics Society. Goldin-Meadow was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. She has been honored with the Quantrell Award for Undergraduate Teaching and the Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award for Graduate Teaching at UChicago, and the Mentor Award in Developmental Psychology from APA. She was awarded the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement in Basic Research from APS in 2015, and the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition in 2021.
Research Interests
Goldin-Meadow’s research focuses on the most basic building blocks of language and thought as they are developed in early childhood. She studies deaf children who have not been exposed to usable input from either a spoken or signed language. These children nevertheless create their own gesture systems, and those gestures are structured like natural language. Her research has thus uncovered linguistic components so fundamental to language that they will arise in a child’s communication system even if that child has no access to linguistic input. Goldin-Meadow has also studied the spontaneous gestures learners, both hearing and deaf, produce when they talk or sign, and has discovered that these gestures can reveal the learner’s readiness-to-learn language, math, and scientific concepts. Spontaneous gesture thus offers a privileged window onto thought, often conveying knowledge that the gesturer is unable to express in speech. Among Goldin-Meadow’s numerous research findings are that blind children, who have never seen anyone gesture, move their hands when they talk. These congenitally blind children not only gesture, but their gestures look just like the gestures sighted children produce when they talk, a finding that highlights the robustness of gesture and its tight relation to speech. Goldin-Meadow is also the principal investigator of the Language Development Project, a longitudinal study funded since 2002 by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The goal of the project is to explore the extent and limits of the language-learning process in 60 typically developing children and 40 children with pre- or post-natal brain injury.
