The role of gesture in language development and evolution.

People naturally produce gestures when they speak. Little is still known about the role these gestures play in children's language development. My research focused on the role of iconic gestures - gesticulations that accompany speech and illustrate what is being said. For instance, you can wiggle your index and middle fingers to depict "walking" or bring your hand to your mouth as if holding a glass to depict "drinking". Children understand these iconic gestures by age 3 and my PhD research suggested that seeing adults produce these gestures while speaking is formative for children's language learning. Studying the ways we can stimulate vocabulary growth in preschool-aged children is very important, because the vobulary size and skills of children at this age are major predictors of later school success.

During the fellowship, I will collect data from one experiment with 3-year-old children that will help us to better understand how seeing iconic gestures facilitates word learning. I will visit local nurseries to play a computer-based word learning game with 96 children. I will publish my research findings from this experiment and from my PhD dissertation in two top-tier scientific journals in developmental psychology and I will present those research findings at one international conference on cognitive development, in Budapest, Hungary.

I will also develop a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellowship proposal that extends my PhD research. I will design a series of lab-based experiments that help us investigate how parents can use nonverbal communication (e.g. facial expressions, body language, and hand gestures) to teach their child new words. I will propose to analyse body position of the parent and child (face-to-face or side-by-side) and eye contact, touch, and gestures.

Moreover, I will visit two internationally leading research groups to develop collaborative research on mother-child interactions. I will visit Simone Pika's biocognition lab, which has collected video recordings of naturalistic social interactions between chimpanzee mothers and their young living in the wild. I will also visit with Susan Goldin-Meadow's gesture lab, which has collected video recorings of naturalistic interactions between parents and children in their family homes. I will gain access to selected parts of these unique datasets and further develop my ideas for a funding proposal. In my future research, I would like to compare the use of gesture in mother-child interactions in humans and great apes, which could tell us more about the origins of human communication. I will develop a Marie-Curie Global Fellowship application with the two hosts that proposes a series of comparative studies.

I will communicate my research to the general audience in five public engagement activities. First, I will mobilise a team of researchers to speak to parents at the NEC Baby Show in Birmingham. More than 17,000 parents attend this event over the course of three days to prepare for the arrival of their new baby. I will inform parents about the importance of child development studies, which leads parents to value child research, and allows them to share their experiences with researchers. I will create an information leaflet for parents to take home, with general information about my research and what a visit to the University involves. Second, I will visit family events at 19 local libraries to talk to parents about the importance of child development research. Third, I will visit Baby Sensory sessions at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry to inform parents there as well, so that I can reach a wider audience. Fourth, I will publish a digital newsletter that provides information about recent findings in developmental studies on language and gesture. Finally, I will regularly update the social media pages of Warwick Research with Kids Group (Facebook and Twitter), so that followers can receive updates about my proposed research activities.