Susan Goldin-Meadow

Susan Goldin-Meadow is an American psychologist and psycholinguist born in 1945, who holds the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professorship at the University of Chicago, with appointments in psychology, comparative human development, and the Committee on Education. Her research examines how children develop language and how gesture supports thinking and learning, including her influential studies of homesign, the gesture systems that deaf children raised without sign language input spontaneously create on their own. She directs a decade long program project grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development studying environmental and biological factors in language growth, co-directs the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center funded by the National Science Foundation, and founded the journal Language Learning and Development. She served as president of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007 to 2012.