Language through Deaf eyes
Fri 12 May 2017, 16:15 - 17:30
- Venue
- The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
Speaker:
Professor Bencie Woll FBA, University College London
Chaired by: Professor Aditi Lahiri FBA, University of Oxford
Sign languages are universally found wherever Deaf communities exist, and are the world’s only truly ‘young’ languages, unrelated to the spoken languages which surround them. This presentation will review the history of British Sign Language – the language of the British Deaf community – and recent linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and neurolinguistic research on the language. Research on signed language creates a new perspective on our understanding of human language generally, helping us consider the origins of human language, how language is processed in the brain, what the universal properties of human language are, and the relationship of how language is produced and perceived to the structure of language itself.
About the speaker:
Bencie Woll is Director of the Deafness Cognition and Language Centre at University College London. Her research and teaching interests embrace a wide range of topics related to sign language and deaf studies, including sign language linguistics, language acquisition in deaf children, sign language impairments, and language and the brain.
There will be British Sign Language interpreting at this lecture.
Arranged in partnership with:
FREE. Registration not required.
Seats allocated on a first come, first served basis
If you have any questions about this event please call the Events Team on 020 7969 5200 or email [email protected]