A seminar by dr. Federica Cavicchio, University of Trento, and prof. Wendy Sandler, University di Haifa
Young Italian scholars travelling between East and West
Young Italian scholars travelling between East and West GESTURES IN BILINGUALISM & SIGN LANGUAGE IN ISRAELA seminar by dr. Federica Cavicchio, University of Trento, and prof. Wendy Sandler, University di Haifa. All communities of humans have a language, and language is one of the main things that make us human. In addition to speech, we often spontaneously gesture. There is no report of a culture without gesture: infants in the one-word stage produce gestures, and even when the visual channel is not present, such as in congenitally blind children, there is presence of gestures. The first part of this talk will focus on how speech and gesture are related. In particular, we will talk about gesture in Italian/English bilinguals. We will discuss if any aspect of gestures is "transferred" from a language to another, focusing on gesture cultural parameters such as number of gestures and gesture space. We will show how language and gesture are tightly linked. In the second part of the talk we will focus on what happens when the auditory channel is not available. As we know, people will create language that is visual. Sign languages of the deaf are natural languages, like spoken languages such as Italian, Hebrew, or English. And like spoken languages, sign languages have their own structure and conventions, and even poetry. Israel is a very small country with a complex mosaic of languages, both spoken and signed. We will speak about some of the sign languages of Israel, addressing questions like, How does sign language come about? What is sign language grammar? and How does language define a community? Wendy Sandler, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Haifa and Founding Director of the Sign Language Research Lab there. For the past decade, she and her colleagues have been investigating the emergence of language structure in a new sign language in a Bedouin village. Through this work, they are identifying the most basic ingredients of language and beginning to understand the role of social contact and community in language emergence. Federica Cavicchio: After completing her Ph.D from the Universita' degli studi di Trento (Italy) in Cognitive Neuroscience, she won a Marie Curie fellowship and worked at the University of Birmingham (UK) on bilingualism and co-speech gesture transfer. She joined the Sign Language Research Lab in June 2014 as a post doctoral researcher on the Grammar of the Body Project. Her goal is to investigate combinatoriality/recombinatoriality of face and body in extreme emotion displays. Event held in Italian and in Hebrew. Monday, February 2nd, 2015, at 18:30 Italian Cultural Institute rehov Meir Rutberg 12 – Haifa