As a part of the Workshop on the Emergence of Universals at The Ohio State University, Assistant Professor Natasha Abner’s talk, "Representation of Event Structure in the Manual Modality: Evidence for a Universal Mapping Bias", will take place on Sunday, February 18. This research is done in collaboration with Ryan King (New York University) and uses data from sign language and gesture to explore whether there are universal communicative biases in how we communicate about events. Click here to view the abstract.

Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow Savithry Namboodiripad will give a talk, on Monday, February 19th entitled, Learning and use in Multilingual Contexts as a Partial Contributor to Linguistic Universals. This talk takes a broad view of language contact and argues that systematically investigating the outcomes of language contact via psycholinguistc methods can help explain typological distributions and motivate universal tendencies. Click here to view the abstract.