Faculty of Humanities, Agder University College, Kristiansand, Norway

Plenary title: Grounding Language and Cognition in (Inter)action and Perception
                        through Multimodality

Plenary abstract: This paper will consider how higher cognitive processes are constructed in and through inter-individual patterns of multi-agent and embodied multimodal interaction. Some relevant questions the paper will explore are: What is the role of embodied multimodal meaning-making in the creation of external representations that guide activity and awareness in various tasks and social practices? How do these resources function to select, connect and focus on cognitively salient aspects of the environment? How do interpersonally coordinated patterns of bodily activity enable agents to lock into environmental tasks, organise them, segment them into separate components, link their different parts into larger wholes, conceptualise them, and enable complex computational tasks to be handled as socially distributed and embodied ones (instead of individually internal and abstract mental ones) whereby the external world is harnessed and coordinated in and through inter-individual activity with embodied sense-making and perception in order to solve cognitive and computational tasks and problems. What are the implications for a theory of learning?

References

Thibault, Paul J. 2004. Brain, Mind, and the Signifying Body: An Ecosocial Semiotic Theory. Foreword by M. A. K. Halliday. London and New York: Continuum.
Thibault, Paul J. 2004. Agency and Consciousness in Discourse: Self-other Dynamics as a Complex System. London and New York: Continuum.
Thibault, Paul J. 2005. ‘What kind of minded being has language: Anticipatory dynamics, arguability, and agency in a normatively and recursively self-transforming learning system, Part 1’. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 1, 2: 261-335.
Thibault, Paul J. 2005. ‘The interpersonal gateway to the meaning of mind: unifying the inter- and intraorganism perspectives on language’. In Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective, Vol. 1. A volume presented to Michael Halliday on the occasion of his 80th birthday at the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Congress, Sydney, July 2005. Ruqaiya Hasan, Christian Matthiessen, and Jonathan J. Webster (eds.), 117-156. London and Oakville, CT: Equinox.
Thibault, Paul J. In press. ‘What kind of minded being has language: Anticipatory dynamics, arguability, and agency in a normatively and recursively self-transforming learning system, Part 2’. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 1, 3.
Thibault, Paul J. In press. ‘Grounding Languag e and Cognition in (Inter)action and Perception’. Language Sciences (special issue edited by Stephen Cowley).

 This strand/parallel session is provisionally divided into:
a) first day: Multimodal literacies: multimodality in cognition, learning, and development;
b) second day: Multimodal literacies and education.

The strand/parallel session covers the following sectors:
multimodal literacies and education e.g. multimodality in the classroom, textbooks, distance and internet mediated forms of teaching and learning, bridges between home and school as teaching and learning environments; the child and multimodal literacies; multimodal genres; multimodality in cognition, learning, and development in humans and other species; brain, mind, cognition, the body and individual learning and development and its relation to multimodal semiosis.