44th Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society “Rethinking Language and Communicative Development”; May 29-31, 2014; San Francisco, USA

Conference Report from Christel Schneider

I recently attended the 44th Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society in San Francisco, USA, “Rethinking Language and Communicative Development”; May 29‒31, 2014.

http://www.piaget.org/Symposium/2014/index.html

The focus of the conference was the complex relationship between language, mind and culture, and the role communicative development plays in our ability to learn from others. The meeting was part of a series of conferences on Cognition and Social Development aimed at directing future research in the discipline.

Amongst others, the following Expert Plenary Speakers were present: Prof. Annette Karmiloff-Smith (Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London), Prof. Eva Jablonka (Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv) and Prof. Katherine Nelson (City University of New York). I found these plenary sessions particularly interesting and educational.

I was invited to speak at the Symposium, “Comparative perspectives on language and communicative development: Joint attention, gestural communication, and non-linguistic vocalizations in non-human primates and human infants.” The symposium was organised and chaired by Prof. Malinda Carpenter (University of St. Andrews and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig/ Germany). It consisted of three talks: Tanja Kaller (University of York), who presented data on joint attention skills in wild chimpanzees and Ugandan and British mother-infant dyads; discussing similarities and differences between these species and cultures. Verena Gersken (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) presented her work on the variety of non-linguistic communicative systems that typically developing toddlers use during their second year of life to engage in referential communication with others. Finally, my own talk was based on work and publications from my doctoral dissertation. I presented findings on the onset of gesturing, and acquisition processes involved, in our closest living relatives, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans living in captivity.

Our symposium attracted many attendees and elicited interesting discussions in relation to the role comparative approaches can have in developing our understanding of communication development in human and non-human great apes (i.e., bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans).

All in all a very interesting and productive experience and I would like to thank UEL’s School of Psychology, Guarantors of Brain and Free University of Berlin (Germany) for supporting my attendance at the meeting.