Speakers
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Adele Goldberg, Ph.D., has been a professor at Princeton University since 2004, initially in the linguistics program and currently in the Psychology Department. Her work on language learning focuses on the role of semantic, social, and statistical factors; her lab aims to explain our creative but constrained use of language in adults and children, L1 and L2, and neurotypical and atypical populations. She has published three books and over a hundred journal articles on topics related to word meaning, language change, metaphor processing and emotion, and the various functions of grammatical constructions. Professor Goldberg is a fellow of the Association of Psychological Science, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Humboldt Foundation.
Language is full of hidden complexity. Most individual words and grammatical constructions can be used to convey a wide range of related meanings that are not easy to shoe-horn into a unified definition: leg can refer to a human leg, a table leg, or the leg of a journey; determine can be used to mean “decide” (determine the grading scale) or “discover” (determine the size of the fossil). This workshop will explore this complexity with a particular focus on implications for autistic individuals, who commonly experience language delays and ongoing communication challenges. Attendees will learn when and why the complexities inevitably arise in languages; review relevant experimental work involving autistic children and adults; and in the afternoon, we will open the discussion to potential studies or teaching tools, based on a combination of the issues raised and the expertise of the attendees themselves.