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Associate Professor of
Cognitive Science
tel 216-368-2795
Crawford 612B
feyDOTparrillATcaseDOTedu
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Fey Parrill
PhD in Psychology & Linguistics, University of Chicago (2006)
Director, Language and Cognition Lab
Research interests: Co-speech gesture, pragmatics, embodied cognition, construction grammar, social cognition, attention.
Research summary: I use gesture to understand the psychological processes involved in producing and understanding language. To understand why a language researcher might study gesture, it helps to know a couple of things. First of all, when people talk, they move their
hands and arms around. Second, these motions are not just expressive (in the sense of adding emotional content to a person's speech). They have meaning that is very intricately
connected to what the speaker is saying. In fact, the relationship between the information expressed by the two modalities (speech and gesture) is so close that many researchers
believe gesture should be considered part of the language system. I study the relationship between gesture and speech because it's quite informative about a speaker's underlying
mental representations--the thoughts she is encoding in language. You can learn more by taking a look at my CV or by visiting the Gesture and Cognition
Lab pages. |
