b. 1948
Susan Goldin-Meadow is a cognitive scientist and developmental psychologist at the University of Chicago whose research centers on the relationship between gesture, language, and thought. She is best known for her studies of homesign — the spontaneous gestural systems created by deaf children not exposed to a conventional sign language — which have provided key evidence about the innateness of linguistic structure. Her work bridges developmental psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.
Demonstrated that deaf children without linguistic input spontaneously develop structured homesign systems with grammatical properties
Established gesture as a window into implicit cognitive knowledge not expressed in speech
Showed that children's gesture-speech mismatches predict readiness to learn new concepts
Contributed empirical evidence to nativist debates on language learnability and poverty of the stimulus
Pioneered gesture studies as a subdiscipline within cognitive development research