Colin Phillips combines linguistics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to understand how language is mentally and neurally encoded, and how children learn language so effortlessly. In the same way that vision scientists study optical illusions in order to reveal the inner workings of the visual system, Phillips and his team study linguistic illusions to reveal how linguistic representations are encoded and navigated in memory. Phillips is also an evangelist for Language Science, a broadly interdisciplinary field that connects fundamental science with applications in education, technology, and health. He is Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, where he also directs the Language Science Center, a center that brings together language scientists from 17 different academic units. He is also Associate Director of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program. He has received multiple awards for innovative interdisciplinary graduate programs. His research has investigated 15 languages, and he directs Langscape, an online portal for language diversity that combines interactive mapping with diverse resources for 6400 languages.
Colin Phillips
Professor of Linguistics & Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, University of Maryland; Director, Maryland Language Science Center; Associate Director, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program
Participant In These Roundtable Discussions
Sat
Apr 18th
2015
Apr 18th
2015
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The Mind of a Child
This roundtable will examine how young children understand and experience the world across developmental stages, and what these differences reveal about cognition, memory, and emotion, with implications for supporting both typical development and developmental disorders.