Contests / awards

Cologne linguist Professor Dr Pamela Perniss, together with three other researchers, has been awarded a Synergy Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Synergy Grants provide funding of approximately 10.5 million euros over a period of six years to excellent researchers working together as a team on a project. Perniss and her partners receive the research prize for their project ‘The system of shape representations in cognition, development and across languages’ (SHAPE).

Professor Perniss researches and teaches in the field of sign language linguistics and heads the department of ‘Interpreting: German Sign Language - German’ at the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Human Sciences. She submitted the application together with colleagues from the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Indiana University Bloomington (USA) and the Structure et Dynamique des Langues Labs (SeDyL) (France). Researchers from the University of Missouri (USA) and the University of East Anglia (United Kingdom) are also involved. “The ERC Synergy Grant is a great success and demonstrates that, among many other areas, our university is conducting cutting-edge research in international projects in the human sciences. I warmly congratulate Professor Perniss on her achievement,” said Professor Dr Joybrato Mukherjee, Rector of the University of Cologne.

In the SHAPE project, the researchers investigate the reciprocal effects of language on thought and thought on language. The aim is to examine the relationship between the visual perception of object shape and the encoding of object shape in the different languages of the world. The project also investigates factors that lead to difficulties in shape perception and language in children on atypical developmental trajectories.
SHAPE brings together expert knowledge in the fields of vision research, child development, language and cognition, sign language, and neurodiverse populations (autism and language development disorders). The goal of the collaboration across these different fields is a unified theory of the principles, variation and interactions between language and the visual domain in the representation of object shape. The theory would describe language diversity through the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural dynamic interaction of language and cognitive systems and would represent significant empirical progress and cross-disciplinary theory development.

The focus on object shape reflects the fact that shape is a prominent feature of the visual world and determines how we perceive and store information about objects, how we interact with them and what uses they can be put to. The abstract properties of shape are moreover richly and diversely encoded in the languages of the world, spoken and signed – for example, in object and category names; positional verbs (e.g. the difference in German between ‘The book steht [stands] vs. liegt [lies] on the table’); or nominal classifiers (e.g. the classifier ‘tiao’ in Chinese for referring to long, thin objects such as snakes, rivers, scarves; or the classifier handshape with an extended index finger for long, thin objects such as trees, pens, persons in German Sign Language (DGS)). In early childhood development, the visual perception of shape and the cognitive representation of shape are interdependent and inherently intertwined with early language acquisition.

Children with atypical developmental trajectories show developmental disorders both in the perception of shape and in language, which can have considerable lifelong consequences. Although the importance of shape is known, there is as yet no theoretical explanation of the underlying system. Furthermore, researchers have not yet approached the topic by integrating findings and methods from different disciplines.
The scientists of the SHAPE project assume that shape holds a privileged status in human representational systems – in perceiving, using, and reasoning about objects and in organizing the structures of the world’s languages – making it key to understanding human intelligence and its developmental trajectories.

Media Contact:
Professor Dr Pamela Perniss
Special Education and Rehabilitation
+49 221 470 76342
pperniss@uni-koeln.de

Press and Communications Team:
Jan Voelkel
+49 221 470 2356
j.voelkel@verw.uni-koeln.de

Press Spokesperson: Dr Elisabeth Hoffmann – e.hoffmann@verw.uni-koeln.de

---

Wissenschaftlicher Ansprechpartner:
Professor Dr Pamela Perniss
Special Education and Rehabilitation
+49 221 470 76342
pperniss@uni-koeln.de