You are cordially invited to the Seminar organized by the Psychology Department.
Date & Time: October 9, 2024; Wednesday at 12:30
Place: A-130
The presentation language will be English.
Presenter: Dr Alimujiang Tusun, (University of Cambridge)
Title: From linguistics to child language development: what can studying non-European languages teach us?
Abstract: Uncovering what is universal and language-specific and how the two interact lies at the heart of all linguistics disciplines. In this talk, I will introduce the functional/typological approach to studying universality and diversity in spatial language and discuss how its insights have been exploited in establishing the relative role of universal versus language specific factors in child language development. I will do this in the context of previous research that has predominantly concerned European languages but will focus on my own work on Uyghur child language, hoping to highlight the importance of language diversity in moving the field forward.
Bio: Dr Alimujiang Tusun is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He received his MPhil (with Distinction) and PhD at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Cambridge, focusing on bilingual child language development. His research explores how basic experiential domains such as SPACE and CHANGE OF STATE are encoded cross-linguistically and how language-universal and language-specific factors shape the acquisition of one or more languages in children and adults. He is also interested in the linguistic and philological study of Turkic languages and is currently working on a monograph on Turkic syntax. His publications have appeared in peer-reviewed international journals including Lingua, Linguistics, Frontiers in Psychology, Language and Cognition, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, International Journal of Bilingualism, Language, Interaction and Acquisition.