In everyday communication, we exchange information not only through language but also through multiple modalities, such as gestures, gaze, facial expressions, and body posture. In my laboratory, we study the role of gesture in communication from the perspective of embodied cognition. In particular, we address questions such as why people gesture while speaking, how gestures are involved in thought and speech processing, and how listeners understand gestures presented together with speech. Through these questions, we aim to clarify the processes through which gesture and language interact to create meaning, as well as how these processes change across development. At present, our research mainly focuses on the following four themes.
Gesture production, thought, and speech processing
When people speak, they often produce gestures spontaneously. Such gestures are thought not only to convey information to listeners but also to support speakers’ own thought processes and speech preparation. In our laboratory, we investigate why people gesture while speaking, and how gestures are involved in processes such as lexical retrieval, conceptualisation, and speech planning, using behavioural experiments, speech analysis, eye-tracking, and neurophysiological measures.
Integrated comprehension of speech and gesture
Children develop language, social understanding, and communicative skills in multimodal environments. Adults around them interact with them by accompanying speech with visual information, such as facial expressions, gestures, and gaze. When and how do children come to understand such multimodal input from adults? To address this question, we experimentally examine the processing and development of children’s integrated comprehension of speech and gesture, using behavioural and physiological measures, including EEG.
Cultural influences on the developmental pathways of gesture and language
Children develop communicative skills through interactions with adults and other children around them. In this process, they learn not only what to express but also how to express it. The learning of such skills is unlikely to be uniform across cultures, because the forms of interaction surrounding children and the communicative value of different expressive behaviours may vary culturally. We therefore observe Japanese children in various settings to examine how bodily communicative behaviours, such as nodding, negation gestures, posture, and gestures, are acquired and learned. In the future, we aim to compare these observations with those from other cultural contexts and clarify developmental pathways of communication that may be characteristic of Japan.
The role of self-touch behaviours
During conversation, people sometimes touch their own hair, face, neck, hands, or other parts of the body. Such self-touch behaviours may appear to be meaningless habits, but they may be involved in emotional regulation, stress reduction, lexical retrieval, speech preparation, and listeners’ impressions of the speaker. In our laboratory, we examine what roles self-touch behaviours play in speakers’ cognitive and emotional processes, as well as how listeners perceive these behaviours and form impressions of the speaker and the message, using experiments, observation, and eye-tracking.
In addition to these main themes, we also study multimodal communication in people with aphasia and the representation of nonverbal behaviours in manga, comics, and picture books. In our aphasia research, we examine communication, assessment, and support using multiple modalities, such as gestures and drawing. In our research on manga, comics, and picture books, we analyse how characters’ gestures, gaze, facial expressions, and postures are depicted, and how these nonverbal behaviours contribute to story comprehension and character understanding.
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