ACQUA

Summary of the project

Throughout history, psychologists, philosophers, and linguists have intensely debated the relationship between language and thought. How these two faculties influence or depend on each other remains contentious. Some theorists argue that language is the source of certain concepts (Carey, 2009) or even all concepts (Quine, 1960), while others, such as Frege (1918), maintain that thought is fundamentally independent of language.

The Emergence and Acquisition of the Human Capacity for Quantification (ACQUA) project operates from the point of view that concepts are independent from language (Fodor, 2008; Sauerland & Alexiadou 2020). This means that language acquisition involves (at least) a two-step process of, first, the formation of underlying concepts and, second, the mapping between these conceptual representations (thought) and linguistic utterances (language). Any difficulties that children may have in understanding language can be attributed to either (i) lacking the underlying concepts or (ii) not grasping the mapping between concepts and the language used to convey them. Experimental evidence of how and when children learn the meaning of certain utterances usually relies on experimental designs that require considerable metalinguistic competence, rendering these tests unsuitable for children below the age of 4 years.

However, as parents of 3-year-old children will readily attest to, children have considerable understanding of complex utterances. This indicates that there is a mismatch between what can be experimentally measured and the real-life capabilities of infants. ACQUA will address these two challenges (i.e. the two-step acquisition and the limitations of the research methodology) by using the acquisition of quantifiers as a case study.

Convocatòria per a la contractació de PDI – Investigador postdoctoral

Obertes dues convocatòries per a la contractació de Personal Investigador de finançament específic –Investigador postdoctoral–, amb destinació al Departament Filologia Catalana

Informació de les convocatòries

https://tauler.seu-e.cat/detall?idEns=11&idEdicte=635872
https://tauler.seu-e.cat/detall?idEns=11&idEdicte=635879