Dr Susan Duncan has a PhD in cognitive psychology and is a researcher in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago. She specializes in psycholinguistic analysis of speakers’ use of gestures in face-to-face interactions. Her research contributes to elaborating a general theory of the human capacity for language which holds that gestures are meaningful and are intricately related to meanings expressed in speech and to the ongoing social interaction. Analysis of them illuminates the analog-imagistic thinking that contributes to language production. The term “imagistic” does not just refer visual imagery, but also to motoric, spatial, and haptic representations. Gesture analytic techniques have been applied to natural language use of different language/cultural groups, children, second language learners, and individuals with neurogenic language disorders. The analytic constructs and theoretical concepts deriving from this research apply usefully, as well, to analyses of deaf signers and language use in the congenitally blind.
Dr Duncan’s research is part of a growing body of work that supports the claim that human language production is fundamentally an embodied phenomenon.
Recent publications include chapters in Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language (John Benjamins, 2007) and Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines (Oxford University Press, to appear 2008).
Dr Kari-Anne Selvik has an MA and a Ph.D. in general linguistics from the University of Oslo, Norway. Her MA thesis dealt with noun class semantics in Setswana (an African language), and her Ph.D. dissertation focused on temporal expressions in Norwegian Sign Language. Both projects were based on Cognitive Linguistics theories. Such theories share the hypotheses that the brain is interactive and non-modular (ie there is no specific language module in the brain), that linguistic knowledge is a special case of general knowledge, and that linguistic structures can be explained on the basis of general cognition.
Kari-Anne has previously worked as a social worker, and has experience from the field of acquired deafblindness.
PhD dissertation: Selvik, Kari-Anne (2006). Spatial Paths Representing Time. A Cognitive Analysis of Temporal Expressions in Norwegian Sign Language. Oslo: Unipub AS
Professor Ivana Marková was born in Czechoslovakia and came to the UK in 1967 as a post-doctoral visitor to the Psychological Laboratory, University of Cambridge. In 1970 she moved to the University of Stirling where she is Emeritus Professor. She has been a visiting professor at various universities in the UK and abroad, currently in the Institute of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and she is an international fellow of the Open Society Institute at the University of Moldova.
Although her main field of research is social psychology, she is interested in opening up social psychology to other human and social sciences, philosophy and to practical applications. Her research is concerned with the development of a dialogical approach and with dialogical concepts in social psychology, particularly in social representations, language and communication. Ideas of dialogicality influence her empirical research in different kinds of communicative disabilities, including learning disabilities and cerebral palsy.
She has published and co-edited a number of books on language and dialogue, eg The Dynamics of Dialogue (co-edited with K. Foppa), Dialogicality and Social representations (2003)CUP; Dialogue in Focus Groups: Exploring Socially Shared knowledge (2007), (with Linell, P., Grossen, M., Salazar-Orvig).
Paul Hart has worked for Sense Scotland since 1987. His posts included support worker, manager of residential services, manager of day services and Head of Services. Since 1998, Paul has been Principal Officer (Practice). He is member of Sense Scotland’s Senior Management Group. Paul holds a Bachelor of Music degree, a PGCE-primary teaching qualification, a Masters Degree in Education, and currently is studying for a PhD at Dundee University, with a research focus on communication development for congenitally deafblind people. He is particularly interested in considering how communication partnerships can talk together about past events.
In his current work, Paul develops and delivers training (including ‘Partners in Communication’) and practice support within Sense Scotland and other organization in the UK, speaks at conferences and seminars, including DbI-conferences, and has undertaken work on behalf of Sense International. Paul is member of a research team from Dundee and Bergen Universities on implications of infant development research for non-typical populations. Working alongside colleagues from two other organizations resulted in a publication (in 2005) and a training course on sex education for people with multiple disabilities. Paul manages a two year project on friendships and relationships for multi-disabled people.
Dr Peter Hobson is Tavistock Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the University of London, and is based at the Tavistock Clinic and the Behavioural and Brain Sciences Unit, Institute of Child Health, University College London.He has a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge. He is also an adult psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst.
Peter’s overriding interest is in the contribution of personal relations to early human development, and the developmental psychopathology of autism and other conditions in which social development has been compromised. His research includes studies of mother-infant relations when the mothers have borderline personality disorder, young children with congenital blindness, and attachment-related and psychodynamic aspects of adult borderline personality disorder. He argues that we need to appreciate the developmental significance of limitations in emotionally configured personal relations if we are to understand the development of autism.
He has written two books; Autism and the Development of Mind (Erlbaum, 1993), and The Cradle of Thought (Pan Macmillan, 2002 and Oxford University Press, US, 2004)
