Susan Goldin-Meadow

Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor
Departments of Psychology and Comparative Human Development

 

Bio

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Comparative Human Development. Her research focuses on the most basic building blocks of language and thought as they are developed in early childhood. Specifically, she is interested in uncovering linguistic components that are so basic they will arise in a child’s communication system even if the child has limited access to outside linguistic input. Professor Goldin-Meadow’s research has also generated more broadly applicable insights into how the spontaneous gestures that learners produce can reveal their readiness to learn language, math, and scientific concepts. Professor Goldin-Meadow is the founding Editor of Language Learning and Development, and has been president of the International Society for Gesture Studies, president of the Cognitive Development Society, chair of the Cognitive Science Society, and president of the Association for Psychological Society.  She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, received the William James award for lifetime achievement in basic research from APS, was elected to the American Academy for Arts and Science in 2005, and presented the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University in 2017.  She has also received awards from the University and the American Association for Psychology for both graduate and undergraduate teaching. Her research been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the March of Dimes, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. 

 

Selected Recent Publications

Wakefield, E. M., Hall, C., James, K. H., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2018). Gesture for generalization: Gesture facilitates flexible learning of words for actions on objects, Developmental Science.

Goldin-Meadow, S., & Brentari, D.  (2017). Gesture, sign and language:  The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, e46.

Asaridou, S., Demir-Lira, O.E., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Small, S.L. (2017).   The pace of vocabulary growth during preschool predicts cortical structure at school age.  Neuropsychologia, 98, 13-23.

Novack, M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2017).  Gesture as representational action:  A paper about function.  Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 24(3), 652-665.

Goldin-Meadow, S., & Yang, C.  (2017). Statistical evidence that a child can create a combinatorial linguistic system without external linguistic input:  Implications for language evolution.  Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 81 (Part B), 150-157.

Ozcaliskan, S., Lucero, C. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2018). Blind speakers show language-specific patterns in co-speech gesture but not silent gesture. Cognitive Science.

Uccelli, P., Demir-Lira, O.E., Rowe, M.L., Levine, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S.  (2018). Children’s early decontextualized talk predicts academic language proficiency in mid-adolescence. Child Development.

Hynes-Berry, M., McCray, J. S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. The Role of Gesture in Teaching and Learning Math. In Growing Mathematical Minds (pp. 83-108). Routledge, 2018.

 Goldin-Meadow, S. (2018). Taking a hands-on approach to learning.  Policy Insights in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5(2), 613-170. 

 CV

Click here to download a copy of Susan Goldin Meadow’s CV.