Experimental Psychology Seminar - Bill Palmer : The OzSpace Project
Joining us for the next experimental psychology seminar, Professor Bill Palmer will discuss the OzSpace Project : an investigation of Landscape, language, and culture in Indigenous Australia
Experimental Psychology Seminar - Bill Palmer : The OzSpace Project
24 Nov 2023, 13:00 – 15:00
Venue:
Room 305 (26 Bedford Way)
Or you can also attend online via Zoom:
https://ucl.zoom.us/j/99450024014?pwd=elV4YmdhbDBsbktweEQwNmtiblZNQT09
Meeting ID: 994 5002 4014 Passcode: 126025
Abstract:
This seminar talk will discuss the Oz Space Project which aims to investigate how landscape interacts with culture and social diversity to build representations of physical space in the minds and grammars of speakers of Australian Indigenous languages. Its goals include the first Australia-wide survey of Indigenous spatial systems correlated with landscape; and the first systematic investigation of diversity among individuals within communities, collecting completely new experimental and natural data in a handful of endangered Indigenous languages. This is expected to reveal what Australian Indigenous languages and cultures can tell us about the nature of human spatial cognition, have significant benefits for the maintenance and revitalization of Indigenous language and culture.
Bill Palmer
Professor
University of Newcastle, Australia
Bill Palmer is lead investigator on the OzSpace project. After a PhD at the University of Sydney Bill held lectureships with the Pacific Languages Unit at the University of the South Pacific, the University of Melbourne and the University of Leeds, and a research fellowship at the University of Surrey, before joining the University of Newcastle where he is Associate Professor.
Bill developed the Topographic Correspondence Hypothesis that underpins OzSpace’s topographic correspondence study, and with collaborators Alice Gaby, Jonathon Lum and Jonathan Schlossberg developed the theory of sociotopography that underpins OzSpace’s sociotopographic study. In addition to leading the project overall, Bill is continuing development of the theory of sociotopography, and implementing the project’s topographic correspondence study surveying spatial systems in their topographic context across 200+ languages of Australia. In addition to work on spatial language and cognition, Bill works on typological, formal and historical studies in Austronesian, Papuan and Australian languages. He is President of the Australian Linguistics Society, and a Fellow of Goodenough College London.