Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker delivers a treatise on the expressive power of language

Steven Pinker, Professor and Director of the McDonnell-Pew Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the 1999 Lucent-Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture on Wednesday 24 March.

In his talk, 'Words and Rules: the ingredients of language', Professor Pinker will, for the first time, discuss material in his forthcoming book, of the same name, to be published in the autumn by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. He will demonstrate that the vast expressive power of human language is made possible by two complementary principles: the arbitrary sound-meaning pairing underlying words, and the discrete combinatorial system underlying grammar.

His thesis implicates two distinct cognitive mechanisms: associative memory and symbol-manipulating rules. He will present evidence from three disciplines, namely cognitive psychology, linguistics and neuroscience. The evidence presented is based in part on the vocabulary statistics and the history of the English language, in part on laboratory studies of children and adults, and also on new material from the study of several neurological disorders, particularly Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

In his work Professor Pinker successfully bridges the gap between academic research and popular science writing. He tours, lectures and broadcasts worldwide and has published several best-selling books on how we acquire and use language.

The support of Lucent Technologies for the Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture this year stemmed from personal contact between Professor Robert Spence and Lucent's Director of Advanced Communications Technologies, Dr. Victor Lawrence, who studied under the late Professor Colin Cherry.

Further information is available from:

Professor Patrick Purcell
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Tel: 0171-594 6258
Fax: 0171-581 4419
http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/cherry

Notes to editors:

1. 'The Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture'. Each year a memorial lecture is held at Imperial College to honour the life and work of Colin Cherry who was Professor of Telecommunications in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and wrote 'On Human Communication'. Previous speakers have included Seymour Papert, Lord Puttnam, Douglas Adams, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Alan Kay and Nicholas Negroponte.