Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

How does the body influence the mind? This compelling question has motivated researchers in psychology, linguistics, human development, and the performing arts for many years. Recent technological innovations and a turn toward interdisciplinary collaboration have opened up new possibilities for scholars seeking ways to disentangle thought from physical sensations. The University of Chicago has emerged as a globally recognized leader in this area of research, known as “embodied cognition,” with pioneering work on gesture, formal and informal sign languages, and the universal features of language. The Body’s Role project (2013–2016) served as a catalyst for additional work in this area, uniting a number of small projects and establishing a foundation for empirical research that cuts across the humanities and social sciences.

The project supported three studies that looked at gesture and sign in relation to storytelling, action, and indexical pointing, respectively. For the storytelling study, Peter Cook—an American Sign Language (ASL) scholar and a renowned Deaf performance artist who served as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow in the 2013–14 academic year—helped conduct comparative analyses of poetry and performance in both English and ASL. The research team used video and motion-capture recordings of ASL and English performers, and then developed coding procedures to analyze aspects like metrical structure and rhythm. The comparisons yielded important insights on the similarities and differences between the ways Deaf and hearing storytellers use their bodies to narrate. Related work in this area explored the role of eye gaze and facial gestures in performance.

The second study used motion-analysis equipment to explore the connections between gesture and action. By observing participants as they encountered perceptual illusions, the researchers were able to determine the extent to which gesture mirrors the actions on which it is based compared to the language it accompanies. Preliminary results were presented at the 2016 International Society for Gesture Studies conference in Paris. A third study, the first of its kind, clarified distinctions between pointing gestures used by signers and pointing gestures speakers produce when they talk.

The schedule of Body’s Role activities at the Neubauer Collegium was ambitious, with conferences and performances, a quarterly workshop series, biweekly meetings, a sign language reading group, and related work. The project culminated with the October 2017 capstone conference, which included a lively evening of performances by sign-language and spoken-language artists, followed by a full day of presentations by graduate students and postdoctoral scholars on the project’s three studies. Herb Clark, a psycholinguist at Stanford University, delivered a keynote address on the use of the body in everyday communication. The event, cited by the research team as a high point of the project, “not only brought together the work that we have been doing on our Neubauer Collegium projects, but also made it clear that this is not a stopping point—we have laid the groundwork for a new set of interdisciplinary interests to flourish among our faculty and students.”

From the outset, the researchers considered next-generation training a central component of the project. Students and postdoctoral fellows were involved in every aspect of the research, from study design, data collection, and statistical analysis to the presentation and publication of findings. Young scholars’ contributions at regular working meetings and reading groups helped the research team think through technical challenges and keep the project’s many activities on track, and the project inspired nearly a dozen student-led projects.

“Very early on, the Neubauer project became an exciting cross-disciplinary hub,” said Kensy Cooperrider, a postdoctoral scholar in the Psychology Department who helped run the study on pointing in gesture and sign. “Collaborations were springing up between young scholars who might not otherwise have talked much to each other. And it wasn’t long before it felt like a community. In my case, being part of this community really broadened my understanding of my research and the questions I was asking—it got me thinking about issues that will be with me for the rest of my career.”

Significant supplemental support for the project was provided by internal partners at the Humanities Division, the Delhi Center, and the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language, a research initiative launched by Diane Brentari, Anastasia Giannakidou, and Susan Goldin-Meadow in March 2013. A $750,000 grant from the NSF Science of Learning competition provided the collaborative network that the Body’s Role project fostered with funds for a three-year project to explore how the body can be incorporated into primary school math education. The Neubauer Collegium also extended its commitment to this growing network with the Motion and Meaning project, which studied the relation between sign and body gesture in classical Indian dance.

This project extended the research team’s investigation of Kim, a remarkable individual without somatosensation, from the restricted area of sensory experience into the broader and more momentous world of affect and emotion. The researchers were motivated by the finding that affect and emotion structure are anchored in interoception, meaning the feeling of the body. Since the feeling of the body depends overwhelmingly on somatosensory sensation, understanding the structure of affect and emotion in a person without somatosensation offers a unique opportunity. Kim is highly social, has likes and dislikes, and does not express any affective, emotional, or social behavior that dramatically differs from the norm. This investigation went beyond casual assessment and compared Kim’s emotion structure to that of healthy and disabled (mobility) controls. Mobility disabled controls were included to account for the challenges and strategies common to those who use a wheelchair to navigate the world while isolating the somatosensory differences unique to Kim.

Words and structures change their meaning over time. The text of laws, however, does not. These two facts make it difficult for judges and others, from the U.S. Supreme Court to the American people, to understand and interpret texts such as the Constitution. Current trends in legal interpretation, in particular the originalist insistence on original public meaning as the primary determinant of a law’s interpretation, make an appropriate historical linguistic understanding urgent – e.g., what did “bear arms” or “the recess of the Senate” mean in 1789? Just as important, how can we determine this? While the Supreme Court has relied heavily on eighteenth-century dictionaries in deciding recent constitutional questions, advances in theoretical and computational linguistics, as well as vast new corpora of English, make it possible for us to determine for the first time with precision what lexical shifts have occurred over the past two centuries, how these shifts have affected both the diachronic semantics of words and phrases, and their syntactic distributions. The results of such inquiries can and should have direct application to questions of statutory and constitutional interpretation. Our project aimed to help create a new methodology at the intersection of law and linguistics, yielding results and models that will change the way legal interpretation is conducted. As part of this project, we developed useable online tools and guides for other researchers and judges to conduct such inquires on their own, and to disseminated these insights and to stimulate cross-disciplinary dialogue between leading scholars of linguistic semantics and of legal interpretation.

This project adopted a field linguistic approach to interrogate the subjectivity of human experience in the absence of a typical sensory palate. The research, drawing on insights from neurobiology and linguistics, centered on a remarkable individual, Kim, whose sensory world is radically different from that of the typical human. Kim relies on vision and hearing and lacks somatosensation (touch, pain, temperature, proprioception). Kim has minimal taste and smell perception. The project’s aim was to learn “the language of Kim.” This required the formalization of a new methodological approach to understand the interaction between linguistic encoding of sensory perception and actual perception. The new approach has broad applicability, as the method can be extended to understand those of different backgrounds, physical conditions, and even species.

This project brings together faculty from the humanities, performing arts, and social sciences to investigate the relationships between meaning and motion, particularly in the context of classical Indian dance. Training in classical Indian dance is intensive and requires mastery of dozens of gestures and facial expressions with extraordinarily subtle distinctions that convey specific emotions to the audience. Aesthetic expectations are very important, and the gestures of dance form a poetics of posture and movement. The overarching question of our work is how meaning is produced by the body, and our goal is to develop a grammar of somatic expression by exploring the ways in which such a grammar would be similar to, or different from, the grammars of spoken and signed languages. Our work will involve two components. The first involves the form-meaning correspondences within the locus of the dancers themselves. The second component investigates the meanings as they are understood by the audiences within the communities in which these dance traditions are typically performed.

This is a collaborative, multidisciplinary project examining the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses of modernity and modernization in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We bring together historians, literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists to jointly study the articulation, circulation, and mobilization of ideas about language death and revival, language reform, and language modernization in the contexts of empire, emerging nationalisms, and a modernized or quickly modernizing world. We also examine the role of developments in linguistics, philology, and adjacent disciplines in informing and shaping such ideas. Some of the questions that animate the discourses this project examines are: what does it mean for a language to be or become a modern language? Can, and should, a dead language be revived? Some of the questions the project leaders ask are: how do notions of native tongue, language family, vernacular dialect or register interact with concepts such as empire, nation, motherland? What role, if any, did language reformers think sacred languages should play? How does the relation between language and the body figure in projects of (re)generation of modern polities and individuals? By studying authors who spoke and wrote in a variety of languages of the Eastern Mediterranean, and their interaction with the political and cultural bodies and movements that played important roles in shaping the modern Middle East, this project aims to reconstruct, and draw new insights about, the rich nexus of language, identity, and modernity.

When children learn language, they learn more than sounds, words, and syntax: they learn how language can be used as a tool for constructing and performing social identities, for relating to others, and for otherwise communicating meaning beyond the literal. And yet, research on early child language learning has traditionally, and markedly, isolated itself from considerations of children’s simultaneous social and cultural development. This interdisciplinary team of developmental psychologists, linguists, and comparative developmentalists seeks to move past this artificial separation. The project brings together methods and theory from developmental psychology and sociolinguistics to examine language at its earliest intersection with social identity: the detection and learning of dialects by infants and young children. This high-risk project leans on the incredible dialect variation across Chicagoland communities to develop and road-test a cross-linguistic and cross-culturally applicable research method for testing children's early sound, word, and social knowledge of different dialects, including an artificial dialect designed to target specific aspects of the learning process. Given the novelty and potential impact of the proposed method, even partial success would make a substantial contribution to our currently limited insight into the very beginnings of children’s knowledge about social variation in language, both generally and with respect to Chicago dialects specifically.

The Sanskrit word śāstra, from a verb meaning “to discipline, to govern,” supplies a blanket term for a vast and heterogeneous spectrum of Southern Asian texts and the social forms in which these have been propagated. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the very basis of South Asian conceptualization and practices of knowledge was founded on the idea of śāstra. With antecedents available throughout the recorded history of India, by the middle of the first millennium CE śāstra had attained something like its recognizable “classical” form: the Laws of Manu are one instance of śāstra, as is the Kāmasūtra or the grammar of Pāṇini; so too are works of philosophy, texts on elephant lore, magical grimoires, or commentaries on literary classics. To pass as codified knowledge in early India (and beyond), was to be framed as śāstra of some sort. Despite this centrality, little sustained reflection has been devoted to understanding what śāstra was and what it did, such that it could have such a formative capacity in shaping cultures and histories throughout Asia. This project will bring together philologists and intellectual historians specializing in Sanskrit and those working in other adjacent linguistic cultures with linguistic anthropologists, historians of science, and specialists of East Asia and the classical West to understand how this package of cultural and cognitive technologies functioned across a range of specific historical and regional contexts, with the intention of better understanding the internal logics and historical instantiation of these practices of knowledge.

Since the University’s inception, UChicago faculty have been pioneers in the study of the ancient world’s literary heritage, including the founding of modern scientific study of writing systems. Signs of Writing was a three-year research project designed to investigate, from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, the cultural and social contexts and structural properties of the world’s oldest writing systems – the world’s first information revolution. Particular emphasis was placed on the four primary, or pristine, writing systems from Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, and Mesoamerica, looking at the similarities and differences in the archaeological and paleographic records across regions and the psycho-linguistic processes by which humans first made language visible. Annual conferences and short- and long-term visiting scholars integrated research from a wide range of disciplines. Organized broadly around the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of early writing, the project concerned itself with a broad range of topics, including the origins and structure of writing systems, the relationship between speech and writing, reading and cognition, the adaptation of writing systems and bilingualism, scribal transmission and education, literacy, the materiality and archaeological contexts of writing, and the rise of literature.