Barbara Landau
| Barbara Landau | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania |
| Known for | Research in language development, spatial cognition |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | Johns Hopkins University |
Dr. Barbara Landau is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University and also chairs the department. Landau specializes in language learning, spatial representation, and the relationships between these foundational systems of human knowledge. She examines questions about how the two systems work together to enhance human cognition and whether one is actually foundational to the other. She is known for her research of unusual cases of development and is a leading authority on language and spatial information in people with Williams syndrome.
Dr. Landau received her B.A. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970, her Ed.M. in educational psychology from Rutgers University in 1977 and her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. Prior to her current position at Johns Hopkins University, she was a faculty member at Columbia University, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Delaware. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. In addition, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Landau’s research focuses on spatial language, spatial cognition and the way that the two interact with one another. In addressing this relationship, there are several possibilities. It could be that universal spatial representations lead to spatial language, that or that language shapes our representations or each plays a role in shaping the other. Dr. Landau has examined these concepts in a number of different psychological settings to make sense of these possibilities.
One way of looking at the relationship is by examining the interaction between non-linguistic spatial memory and language. One study looked at the way at this relationship by comparing English, Korean and Japanese speakers on several tasks. In tasks where participants had to describe spatial relationships, they used different types of language. For example, English speakers only used contact terms (e.g. touch, sit on) when a reference object was touching the top side of a figure object but Japanese and Korean speakers used contact terms regardless of which side of a figure object the reference object was touching. However, the languages did not differ on every dimension of language use. Axial terms, which refer to either the vertical or horizontal orientation of objects (e.g. left, above), were used consistently across languages.
...
Wikipedia