Why is it that language is good at describing certain states of affairs (e.g., how to get to the cinema, or the kinship relation between me and my grandfather), but very limited in others (e.g., describing smells or faces)? What kinds of transformations of concepts are involved in describing what we see and otherwise experience? Language has to interact with a wide range of other representation systems – haptic, olfactory, auditory, visual, conceptual – if we are going to talk about the world. 

This project of the Language & Cognition department is concerned with the nature of categories and concepts in language, in non-linguistic perception and cognition, and the relationship between them. It focuses on the various congruencies and incongruencies across different levels of cognitive representation, perceptual, conceptual and linguistic. more >