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Description
The study of human language and cognition has traditionally focused on users of spoken languages, acquired by 鈥榚ar鈥� early in life. This explores what the study of deaf people can add to our understanding of human language and cognition. Many people born deaf use a visual language, acquired by 鈥榚ye鈥�, often outside the normal timeframe for language acquisition. The study of deaf people and sign languages is an essential test of universality, but also widens our sphere of thinking from beyond the speech modality, enabling us to study rich aspects of multi-modal human communication that would be missed if we only focused on spoken languages in hearing individuals.
The module will be taught by deaf and hearing active researchers from the world-leading UCL Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre. There will be 10 weekly 2hr in-person sessions. One of the in-person sessions may be allocated to preparation/delivery of an assessment or to a debate.
Indicative Topics
- Deaf identitity and deaf culture
- Language and cognitive development in deaf children
- Sign language linguistics
- Sign language processing in the brain
- Brain plasticity in deaf individuals
Module Aims
- Familiarise students with research in the fields of deafness, cognition and language
- Understand the social and theoretical issues that impact research in such areas and viceversa
- Understand issues involved in designing and undertaking research with populations of deaf individuals
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Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year
Last updated
This module description was last updated on 8th April 2024.
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