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Lake Forest, Ill. - The Lake Forest College Biology Department and its Beta Beta Beta chapter (national undergraduate biology honorary) invite the community to attend “How our Hands Help us Think” presented by Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow leading expert on language creation and gesture’s role in communication. The presentation will be held on Wednesday, November 8 at 4:00 p.m. in Meyer Auditorium, Hotchkiss Hall. A pre-seminar reception will be held at 3:30 pm in the First Floor Lobby at Hotchkiss Hall.

This is the keynote address for the 2006 Brain Awareness Week.
(November 6-10) at Lake Forest College. This educational community outreach event is the collaborative effort of students and faculty at Lake Forest College studying Brain, Mind, and Behavior. The public is welcome to attend the week’s events free of charge. Please call 847-735-6010 for more information.

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in psychology at the University of Chicago and member of the Committee on Human Development at Chicago. She is an internationally renowned scholar on the relationship between language and thought and she has written over 130 articles, reviews, and book chapters on this topic. In 2001, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship which led to her two recently published books, Resilience of Language and Hearing Gesture. In addition, she edited Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought in collaboration with Dedre Gentner.

Professor Goldin-Meadow’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the March of Dimes, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke. She has recently found that deaf children whose profound hearing losses prevent them from learning the speech that surrounds them, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign, invent gesture systems which are structured in language-like ways. She has found that gesture can convey substantive information – information that is often not expressed in the speech it accompanies. Gesture can thus reveal secrets of the mind to those who pay attention.

She is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American association for the Advancement of Sciences, American Psychological Society and American Psychological Association. She has received the Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award for Graduate Teaching and the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago. She has been past President of the Cognitive Development Society and is the editor of the new journal sponsored by the Society for Language Development, Language Learning and Development.

Lake Forest College is a national liberal arts institution located 30 miles north of downtown Chicago. The College has 1,400 students representing 47 states and 55 countries.


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Contact: Irene Ratliff
847-735-6010
ratliff@lakeforest.edu