The Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, section for Cognition,
Development and Disability invites to a guest lecture by
Prof. Michael Siegal
University of Sheffield, UK
Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 3.15 PM
Room/lecture hall: D22
Is language the key to reasoning?
Unique insight into the effects of access to language on reasoning comes from research involving deaf children, children with access to more than one language, and adults with aphasia. The findings are relevant to one of the most central issues in cognitive science: the relation between language and cognition as shown by investigations of reasoning in domains such as theory of mind, number, and spatial relations. Recent studies in these domains illustrate the extent to which reasoning is dependent on aspects of language such as grammar and conversational pragmatics.
Professor Siegal is a world renowned scholar whose research covers areas such as the development of conversational pragmatics, how conversational understanding relates to children’s conceptual knowledge in biology and cosmology as well as number and ‘theory of mind’ reasoning. In these areas, he has published extensively. Examples are:
(1) Yazdi, A. A., German, T. P., Defeyer, M., and Siegal, M. (2006). Competence and contributions to performance in belief-desire reasoning: The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about false beliefe? Cognition, 100, 343-368.
(2) Siegal, M., and Varley, R. (2002). Neural systems involved in `theory of mind´. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 463-471.
(3) Woolfe, T., Want, S. C., and Siegal, M. (2002). Signposts to development: Theory of mind in deaf children. Child Development, 73, 768-778.
All are welcome!
