How do objects shape our language?
Objects and shapes influence language and how we see the world. The European Research Council is supporting research on this topic with a NOK 123 million Synergy Grant.
Shape is a prominent feature of the visual world and determines how we perceive and store information about objects, how we interact with them and what uses they can be put to.
It is also richly encoded in the languages of the world by organizing object labels in terms of their shape (tall elongated objects, slim objects, round oval objects), as well as actions involving manipulating those objects which are encoded in verbs.
“The exciting thing is that form is also coded in language across cultures. Forms have an important function in how the language’s structure is organized through grammar. It also affects the meaning of the words and the relationship of the words to the objects they represent,” says Mila Vulchanova, a professor at the Department of Language and Literature at NTNU.
The European Research Council (ERC) has just awarded an EUR 10.5 million Synergy Grant (NOK 123 million) to further research in this field. The project is called SHAPE: The system of shape representations in cognition, development and across languages.
Mila Vulchanova will coordinate the project with NTNU researcher Valentin Vulchanov.
ERC Grants
- The European Research Council (ERC) was established by the EU in 2007 and is the leading European funding organization for outstanding research.
- Every year, the ERC funds the very best, creative researchers to run projects based in Europe.
- NTNU has a goal of increasing the number of applications and percentage of acceptances in the ERC calls. The university has increased its project portfolio from Horizon 2020 to Horizon Europe.
- ERC grants are divided into Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy Grants. A Synergy grant is where 2 to 4 researchers come together to solve a question that they could not solve without joint expertise.
- The ERC has funded more than 10,000 top researchers and over 16,000 projects, in addition to PhD students and other employees who work in its research teams.
- The ERC strives to attract top researchers from all over the world to come to Europe.
“The Faculty of Humanities is very proud of this award. The project deals with a very exciting issue that could have a major impact on our understanding of language more generally,” says Terje Lohndal, a professor in the Department of Language and Literature, and NTNU’s Vice-Dean of Research
Professor Mila Vulchanova. Photo: NTNU
Lohndal thanks everyone, particularly project manager Vulchanova for the great effort in making this happen and congratulates the research group on the award.
Important in children’s language development
Around the second year of life, young children start paying attention to shape as a vital cue for acquiring the label of objects, a phenomenon known as “the shape bias”. The shape bias develops at the intersection between spatial ability skills and language, especially vocabulary size.
The dynamics of this relationship is largely understudied. In addition, children on atypical developmental trajectories tend to have problems in using the shape bias in word learning. Exactly what is causing these problems has not been identified.
The main goals of SHAPE are to map out the relationship between the visual perception of shape and its encoding across languages in the world and to identify the factors which constrain the observed cross-linguistic variation.
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Shapes across languages
In Japanese, for example, there is no word for zipping clothes, unlike English, but there are specific verbs for putting on clothes depending on their shape, such as pants.
Sign languages are also an example of how shape organizes the lexicon and grammar of language, with the hands representing visual-geometric properties of real-world referents.
The researchers are interested in the two-way relationship between spatial cognition and language across speakers in different cultures, across development and the factors which conspire to produce difficulties in this domain in children on atypical developmental paths.
“The plan is to explore the dynamics of the development of language skills in children in these cultures, and the development of ‘the shape bias’. This applies both to spoken language and sign language and in children with typical development and children with atypical development,” says Vulchanova.
SHAPE combines the expertise and builds on the synergy of researchers in vision research, child development, language and cognition, sign language and neuro-diverse populations (autism and developmental language disorder) in 5 countries in Europe and the USA.
The SHAPE researchers are Mila Vulchanova (NTNU, Norway), Linda Smith (Indiana University, USA), Pamela Perniss (Köln University, Germany), Frank Seifart (CNRS, France), Larissa Samuelson (UEA, UK) and Caroline Larson (University of Missouri, USA).
