Language and Cognition
Berkeley has an original and diverse approach to the topic of language and cognition, ranging from the philosophical to the experimental, from the signed to the spoken modalities of language, from the behavior of children to that of adults. UC Berkeley does not offer a Ph.D. in cognitive science per se, although it does have an undergraduate major. Graduate work in cognitive science is carried out, in an appropriately interdiscplinary way, in the Departments of Linguistics, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy and Anthropology. In Linguistics, the faculty focusing in the area of language and cognition are Eve Sweetser (historical linguistics, semantics and meaning changes, the semantics of grammatical constructions, cognitive linguistics, metaphor and iconicity, subjectivity and viewpoint, the relationship between language and gesture); George Lakoff (human conceptual systems, e.g. metaphor; cognitive framing of social and political issues; cognitive structure of philosophy and mathematics; neural, connectionist fundations of conceptual systems); Alice Gaby, and Keith Johnson (effect of language experience on speech perception; cross-linguistic regularities vs. language-specific aspects of speech perception; malleability of speech perception).