Why do we gesture when nobody can see us? - Cognitive Science Society Welcome to CogSci Unpacked, an exciting blog series dedicated to summarizing academic papers from the Cognitive Science, a CSS Journal. Our goal is to bridge the gap between academia and the broader p...

Delighted to see coverage of our recent publication in the @cogscisociety.bsky.social journal news. See a lay explanation within!

cognitivesciencesociety.org/why-do-we-ge...

Happy to share another paper, the second from my PhD! This time a preprint.

We find a really interesting relationship between metaphoric gesturing, lexical retrieval errors, and healthy ageing. This occurred during occlusion of gestures, contra 'pragmatic' accounts

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Thank you! More to come soon hopefully...

Variation in Interactive Gestures by Visual Occlusion and Topic Complexity: Evidence for a Subconscious Theory of Gesture Gestures are often categorized into types: iconics, metaphorics, and pantomimes (having representational relationships with spoken semantics), deictics (i.e., pointing), emblems (having their own con...

Delighted to share the first output of my PhD!

Interactive gestures - ones we use to manage discourse and interact with interlocutors (v. understudied but highly prevalent) - are used even when the hands can't be seen, esp. during complex conversations!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

6. Developed a typology of interactive gestures: two types (acknowledging and transferring) and many subtypes
7. Found evidence that gesture handshape kinematics have organisational properties over gesture phrases akin to natural language syntax (e.g. non-adjacent dependency)

2. Made world's largest (semi-)naturalistic gesture corpus
3. Interactive gestures sig. fall when you can't see interlocutor torso
4. Specific gestures sig. co-occur with specific errors (e.g. metaphoric with anomia)
5. Gesturer profiles-EFA suggests ppl use representational or conversational types

Over the recent months, I've had lots of fun presenting main findings from my PhD's first phase! I thought I'd share some highlights :)

1. Evidence of separate reps in the brain of British Sign Language and English in an awake craniotomy patient, confirming reviews of unimodal bilingual patients

Here in beautifully leafy (and compared to the UK, wonderfully town-planned) Nijmegen for the @isgs2025.bsky.social conference! Find myself particularly taken by the suburban architecture for reasons I cannot yet explain.

Excited for the event and to meet other researchers for the first time!

Statistical or Embodied? Comparing Colorseeing, Colorblind, Painters, and Large Language Models in Their Processing of Color Metaphors Can metaphorical reasoning involving embodied experience—such as color perception—be learned from the statistics of language alone? Recent work finds that colorblind individuals robustly understand a...

Delighted to see our paper in @cogscisociety.bsky.social!

We look at how individuals from different backgrounds/LLMs approach the interpretation of colour metaphors they know or ones we made up ('novel').

Blog: cognitivesciencesociety.org/color-metaph...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Immediately purchased. Love it!

You're so bloody smart

Excited to announce my special session @lagbling.bsky.social 2025 conference!

Title: Gesture and the Linguistic System.
Deadline: 14th April 2025

Papers should treat gesture with (formal) linguistic analysis to elucidate its systemic properties as a part of language

www.lagb.org.uk/lagb2025

Application for Membership to the LAGB Postgraduate Student Committee (LAGBPSC) The Linguistics Association of Great Britain Postgraduate Student Committee (LAGBPSC) is looking for UK-based postgraduate students to join the Committee. Priority will be given to applicants in their...

📣Applications open for two new members!

Our chair @GianlucaPorta5 and secretary @NevenaKlobucar will be soon leaving the committee 👋 and two new positions will be available!

If you are interested in joining us, apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

For sure! Perhaps I can share the data to help train the model when I'm done!

This is super clever and exciting work, really impressive! Though, also very timely as I've nearly finished manually coding ~50 participants' gestures from 30-minute naturalistic conversations in ELAN...!!

So I'm continually impressed with my research assistant, they did an incredible job. Really affirms to me the importance of listing your research assistants as co-authors - in these contexts, I can't argue strongly enough for it.

Being a confederate in a psychology/conversation experiment is *really* hard. Conversing with people pretending you're naive to the experiment, acting as if everything's new each time, keeping the paradigm running smoothly, not getting drawn into debating people's terrible takes! I could never!!

Awake craniotomy with English and British sign language mapping in a patient with a left temporal glioblastoma reveals discordant speech-sign language maps - Acta Neurochirurgica The aim of this case study was to describe differences in English and British Sign Language (BSL) communication caused by a left temporal tumour resulting in discordant presentation of symptoms, intra...

Imaginably tough especially because clinic can bring a lot one might want to write about! Our lab recently had a cool case, though that did require significant overtime prep & writing effort: doi.org/10.1007/s007...

Going from a purely academic to an academic-clinical position has posed personal challenges I never expected. Being confronted with a preference for pragmatism is very humbling for the conscientious perfectionism that academia culturally curates. Although perhaps this is just UG -> PhD anyway

A lot of us bought the course textbook in my undergrad, which was very much a collection of authored chapters like a handbook, though I think that was because it was written by everyone at @lancslinguistics.bsky.social! Smart marketing!!

Our group at USC had similar recently, though we did choose to accept. What's on my mind is how valuable the unrecorded impact on students (who just read and don't cite) is. I suppose authors' decisions to contribute vary by whether it's a gap in the literature or students that's fuelling demand

Super excited to hear you working on this! I'm actually mid-way coding the results of a gesture experiment that I guess could be a corpus too... I'm nearly 80% done and so far have ~5,500 gesture tokens. Happy accident of recruiting more participants than I realised I needed :)

Really excited to be heading to Barcelona for the 7th Mapping/Neuropsychological Assistance Workshop 2024 at the University Hospital of Bellvitge this week, then on to Cardiff for the Brain Box NIBS workshop!

Super busy but can't think of a better way to learn these vital skills hands on!!

Fundamentals of Getting a Job as a Linguist - Careers Talk Series YouTube video by LAGB Postgraduate Student Committee

It was a pleasure to host Anna Marie Trester from the Linguistic Society of America for the first session of our Career Talks!

You can find the recording on YouTube 🍿
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVcp...

📌Next talk is on the 12th of December!