Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Evie Malaia

From vision to sense: neural bases of sign languages

The ability to interpret signals from the environment, and to construct mental representations of those signals, is a defining feature of communication. In the course of human evolution, language has followed human ability to identify discrete actions. Yet, the hypothesis that language processing builds on neural circuitry underlying action understanding has not been tested due to the difference in modalities between language and action.
I will use evidence from sign language research to identify neural mechanisms of action understanding and language comprehension by convergent modeling of communicative signal and neural activity in the visual modality. The aim of modeling information transfer between the linguistic signal and its neural processing is to identify neural computations that define human ability to produce and understand language, and 'dial back' the model to understand evolution of language.