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, and the John P. McGovern Award Lecture in the Behavioral Sciences at the AAAS in 2019. She was awarded the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition by the Cognitive Science Society in 2021, received Honorary Degrees from the University of Geneva in 2022 and from  alma mater, Smith College, in 2023.  She was elected to the American Academy for Arts and Science in 2005, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Selected Recent Publications

Goldin-Meadow, S.  Discovering the biases children bring to language learning. Perspectives in Child Development, 2020, 14, 195-201. doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12379.

Raudenbush, S. W., Hernandez, M., Goldin-Meadow, S., Carrazza, C., Foley, A., Leslie, D., Sorkin, J.E. & Levine, S.  (2020).  Longitudinally adaptive assessment and instruction increase numerical skills of preschool children. PNAS, 117 (45), 27945-27953. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002883117

Ping, R., Church, R.B., Decatur, M-A., Larson, S.W., Zinchenko, E., & Goldin-Meadow, S.  Unpacking the gestures of chemistry learners:  What the hands tell us about correct and incorrect conceptions of stereochemistry. Discourse Processes, 2021, 58, 2, 213-232, doi: 10.1080/0163853X.2020.1839343.

Silvey, C., Demir-Lira, O. E., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Raudenbush, S. (2021). Effects of time-varying parent input on child language outcomes differ for vocabulary and syntax. Psychological Science, 536-548, doi: 10.1177/0956797620970559.

Brown, A., Pouw, W., Brentari, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. People are less susceptible to illusion when they use their hands to communicate rather than estimate.  Psychological Science, 2021;32(8):1227-1237. doi:10.1177/0956797621991552

Ping, R., Parrill, F., Church, R.B., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2022) Teaching stereoisomers through gesture, action, and mental imagery. Chemistry Education: Research and Practice

Rissman, L., Horton, L., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2023) Universal constraints on linguistic event categories: a cross-cultural study of child homesign.  Psychological Science https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221140.

Goldin-Meadow, S.  The mind hidden in our hands.  Topics in Cognitive Science, in press.

Goldin-Meadow, S., & Arnon, I.  Whole-to-part development in language creation.  Trends in Cognitive Science, in press.

Alhama, R.G., Foushee, R., Byrne, D., Ettinger, A., Alishahi, A., Goldin-Meadow, S.  Using computational modeling to validate the onset of productive determiner-noun combinations in English-learning children.  PNAS, in press.

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.