Carly A. Anderson
(Associate Member)
University College London
carly.anderson@ucl.ac.uk
Carly Anderson is a UCL Senior Research Fellow and a Principal Investigator based at both UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and at the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre. She is currently funded by a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and hosted by Professor Mairéad MacSweeney in the Visual Communication Research Group. She is a Visiting Researcher on Professor Stefan Schweinberger et al.’s ViCom project.
As a hearing child of congenitally deaf grandparents, and the daughter of a British Sign Language (BSL) Interpreter, BSL became her second language. She conducts her research through a diverse and inclusive lens informed by her experiences and the expert lived experiences of the Deaf community.
During her PhD she examined how the brain adapts after cochlear implantation in deaf adults. Importantly, she studied the neglected role of visual information and how this is combined with auditory information during social communication. Her current research focusses on how the brain coordinates visual information from the face and auditory information from the voice to support language and emotion perception. She is interested in how deafness and different language experiences, including accessing speech via a cochlear implant and bilingualism, can shape these processes. Her research has implications for optimising real-world language outcomes for people who are deaf and use a cochlear implant by taking a multimodal perspective of human communication and the brain.
Selected publications
- Anderson, C.A., Cushing, S.L., Papsin, B.C., Gordon, K.A. (2022). Cortical imbalance following delayed restoration of bilateral hearing in deaf adolescents. Human Brain Mapping, 43 (12), 3662-3679. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25875
- Anderson, C.A., Wiggins, I.M., Kitterick, P.T., Hartley, D.E.H. (2017). Adaptive benefit of cross-modal plasticity following cochlear implantation in deaf adults. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 114 (38), 10256-10261. https://doi:10.1073/pnas.1704785114
- Anderson, C.A., Lazard, D.S., Hartley, D.E.H. (2017). Plasticity in bilateral superior temporal cortex: Effects of deafness and cochlear implantation on auditory and visual speech processing. Hearing Research, 343, 138-149. https://doi:10.1016/j.heares.2016.07.013
Conference abstracts: - Gregoire-Mitha, N., Barton, J. J., MacSweeney, M., & Anderson, C. A. (2022). Impact of visual speech on gaze following in monolingual and bilingual adults. Journal of Vision, 22(14), 3360-3360. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3360
- Anderson, C., Schweinberger, S. (2022). Multimodal socio-emotional communication: basic mechanisms and functioning in altered sensory and central conditions. Psychophysiology. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14139
Camila Antonio Barros
(Associate Member, PhD Candidate)
Free University of Berlin
c.antonio.barros@fu-berlin.de
Camila Antonio Barros is currently working on a PhD project that explores the coordination between gesture and speech in Spanish and Portuguese, focusing on how gestures align with phonological, semantic, and pragmatic domains. In the initial phase, a corpus of recipe descriptions from Spanish (Bogotá, Madrid) and Portuguese (Lisbon, São Paulo) speakers was annotated to examine how prosodic domains are associated with phonological anchors, semantic meanings, and pragmatic functions. Preliminary findings suggest that gestures are linked to speech through complex, context-dependent associations, often diverging from McNeillian synchronicity rules. The next phase will use experimental paradigms to further explore the differences between synchronicity and alignment.
Selected publications
- Barros, C. A., Reich, U., Dufter, A. Revisiting Rhythm in Romance Languages. In press. In Lars Meyer & Antje Strauss (eds.), Rhythms of Speech and Language: Culture, Cognition, and the Brain. Cambridge University Press.
- Barros, C. A., Ciprián-Sánchez, J. F., & Santos, S. M. (2024). A Tool for Determining Distances and Overlaps between Multimodal Annotations. In N. Calzolari, M.-Y. Kan, V. Hoste, A. Lenci, S. Sakti, & N. Xue (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) (pp. 1705–1714). ELRA and ICCL.
- arros, C. A. & Mello, H. (2023). The C-ORAL-BRASIL proposal for the treatment of multimodal corpora data: the BGEST corpus pilot project. In: Ramírez, A. G.; Mejía, J. M.; Martin, P. V. Digital Humanities, Corpus and Language Technology / Humanidades Digitales, Corpus y Tecnología del Lenguaje. University of Groningen Press. DOI: 10.21827/64db66b6f1039
- Barros, C. A. & Mello, H. (2023). Metodologia de alinhamento som/gesto: o que nos revela a fala espontânea. In: da Hora, D. Helmer, A. Interseções Linguísticas: Estudos diversos. São Paulo: Líquido Editorial. p. 54-70.
Kathryn Barnes
(Associate Member)
Goethe University Frankfurt
barnes@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Kathryn Barnes is a doctoral researcher in formal semantics at Goethe University. She completed her BA in French and German Studies at the University of Warwick in 2016 and her MA in Linguistics at The University of Manchester in 2019, where her thesis was based on fieldwork on the semantics of modal verbs in Malay. Her research has since turned to iconicity, with a particular focus on ideophones, including experimentally investigating the meaning and at-issue status of ideophones crosslinguistically, as well as developing a semantic account for the phenomena. She is also interested in exploring how ideophones interact with other iconic enrichments such as gestures and understanding ideophone-like constructions in other modalities, for example classifier constructions and idiomatic signs in sign language.
Selected publications
- Barnes, K. R., Ebert, C., Hörnig, R., & Stender, T. (2022). The at-issue status of ideophones in German: An experimental approach. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5827
Marion Bonnet
(Associate Member, PhD Candidate)
University of Göttingen
marion.bonnet@uni-goettingen.de
Marion Bonnet graduated in 2021 from the University of Paris, France, where she received her Bachelor and Master in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics. Since September 2021, she is affiliated with Göttingen University and works as a PhD student for the IDEAlISM project (collaboration of UCL, Frankfurt and Göttingen University). Her research focuses mainly on pointing gestures and their interaction with speech at the semantic-pragmatic interface, aiming at a more complete understanding of multimodal communication and a potential enrichment of linguistic models. She proposes to investigate this topic by adopting an experimental approach fed by sign language, semantic and pragmatic theories.
Selected publications
- Bonnet, M., Donati, C., & Geraci, C. (2022). Evidence for early lexical integration of speech and gestures. In NELS 52: Proceedings of the Fifty-Second Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (Vol. 1, pp. 81-94).
- Schlenker, P., Bonnet, M., Lamberton, J., Lamberton, J., Chemla, E., Santoro, M., & Geraci, C. (2022). Iconic Syntax: Sign Language Classifier Predicates and Gesture Sequences. Linguistics and Philosophy.
Jana Bressem
(Associate Member)
TU Chemnitz
jana.bressem@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
Jana Bressem is Post-Doc at the chair for German Linguistics, Semiotics and Multimodal Communication at the TU Chemnitz. She is the head of the center „Gesture Studies and Speech Sciences“, executive board member and project leader in the CRC 1410 “Hybrid Societies” in a project on “Intentionality and joint attention in multimodal interaction”. Jana Bressem received her PhD at the European University Viadrina in 2012 where she has also worked in various (interdisciplinary) research projects. She is interested in the multimodality of language (speech/gesture, text/image), typological gesture studies, language and cognition, pragmatics, and human-machine interaction.
Selected publications
- Bressem, J. (2015). Repetition als Mittel der Musterbildung bei redebegleitenden Gesten. In C. Dürscheid & J.G. Schneider (eds.), Satz, Äußerung, Schema (pp. 422-442). Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.
- Bressem, Jana (2021). Repetitions in gesture: A cognitive-linguistic and usage based perspective. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter: Mouton. Bressem, J., & Ladewig, S. H. (2011). Rethinking gesture phases: Articulatory features of gestural movement? Semiotica, 184(1/4), 53–91. doi:10.1515/semi.2011.022
- Bressem, J., Ladewig, S. H., & Müller, C. (2013). Linguistic annotation system for gestures (LASG). In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & S. Teßendorf (eds.), Body-Language-Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 38.1.) (pp. 1098-1125). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Bressem, J., Stein, N., & Wegener, C. (2017). Multimodal language use in Savosavo: Refusing, excluding and negating with speech and gesture. Pragmatics, 27(2),173-206. doi:10.1075/prag.27.2.01bre
- Harrison, Simon, Silva H. Ladewig & Jana Bressem (eds.) (2021). The diversity of recurrency: Recurrent gesture cross-linguistically, Gesture 20:2 (Special Issue).
Ingmar Brilmayer
(Associate Member)
University of Cologne
ibrilmay@uni-koeln.de
Ingmar Brilmayer is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the research project “Communication Electrified” (Volkswagenstiftung) with Prof. Petra Schumacher at the University of Cologne. Since 2020 he works on language in interaction and the integration of multimodal cues using combined EEG and eye tracking recordings with freely moving participants. Ingmar Brilmayer received his Bacherlor’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany), and his Master’s degree in Psycholinguistics, as well as his PhD at the University of Mainz (Mainz, Germany).
Selected publications
- Brilmayer, I., Werner, A., Primus, B., Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., & Schlesewsky, M. (2019). The exceptional nature of the first person in natural story processing and the transfer of egocentricity. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(4), 411-427.
- Röhr, C. T., Brilmayer, I., Baumann, S., Grice, M., & Schumacher, P. B. (2021). Signal-driven and expectation-driven processing of accent types. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 36(1), 33-59.
- Brilmayer, I., & Schumacher, P. B. (2021). Referential chains reveal predictive processes and form-to-function mapping: An electroencephalographic study using naturalistic story stimuli. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 623648
Valentina Colasanti
(Associate Member)
Trinity College Dublin
Valentina.Colasanti@tcd.ie
Valentina Colasanti is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin. Her research profile is situated within both theoretical linguistics and Romance linguistics (especially the Italo-Romance sub-family of languages). Most of her publications involve applying generative linguistic theory to syntactic and semantic phenomena from Italo-Romance.
In 2019, her interests broadened into the study of phenomena expressed within the visual modality, i.e. gesture. Such phenomena have been almost entirely overlooked in theoretical syntax and in Romance linguistics more generally. Her work in this area adopts a purely formal approach, drawing empirically from the gesture-rich languages of Southern Italy in particular. In 2020, she established the Gestural Grammar Lab (GestuGram Lab) at Trinity College Dublin after successfully competing for funding streams. She is currently directing the lab, which so far comprises two PhD students, one lab manager, five research assistants (postgraduate and undergraduate), and two fieldworkers.
Selected publications
- Colasanti, Valentina (2023). Gestural focus marking in Italo-Romance, Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 9/(4)/5, 1-39. doi: https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.296.
- Colasanti, Valentina (2023). Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8(1), 1–45. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9743.
- Colasanti, Valentina (2023). Auxiliary selection in Southern Lazio. Some implications for Romance microvariation and its limits, L’Italia dialettale, LXXXIV, 97–150.
- Colasanti, Valentina (2022). Micro-contact in Southern Italy: language change in Southern Lazio under pressure from Italian, Languages 2022, 7, 286. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7040286.
- Colasanti, Valentina (2021). Criterial positions as diagnostics in Italo-Romance: some highs and lows. Revue roumaine de linguistique, LXVI, 2-3, 265–282.
- Colasanti, Valentina and Martina Wiltschko (2019). Spatial and discourse deixis and the speech act structure of nominals, Proceedings of the Canadian Linguistic Association Annual Meeting (CLA), 1-3 June 2019, Vancouver BC.
Arianna Colombani
(Associate Member, PhD Candidate)
University of Potsdam
colombani@uni-potsdam.de
I am a psycholinguist focusing on gesture learning and multimodal communication in hearing and hearing-impaired populations. I came to academia after several years of working as an Italian Sign Language interpreter and a school-based educator. I am currently a PhD student in Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Potsdam (Germany) and Macquarie University (Australia) within the IDEALAB PhD program, under the joint supervision of Prof. Outi Tuomainen, Prof. Mridula Sharma, Prof. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, and Dr. Amanda Saksida.
My PhD research investigates whether statistical learning mechanisms, well-established in spoken word learning, also apply to language expressed in the visual modality, with a specific focus on symbolic gestures. To address this question, I study gesture learning across development using EEG and eye-tracking measures.
Selected publications
- Saksida A., Rebesco R., Scuderi M., Colombani A., Messineo I., Pavani F., Orzan E., Pintonello S., (2025). The role of symbolic gestures in the path towards auditory rehabilitation of infants with hearing loss: a feasibility study. Deafness & Education International, https://doi.org/10.1080/14643154.2025.2541433
- Colombani, A., Peter V., Quian, Y.M., Saksida A., Boll-Avetisyan N., Tuomainen O., Sharma, M. (2025), Cross-situational learning of sign-like gestures in children and adults: a behavioural and event-related potential study. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2025.2539136
- Rebesco, R., Colombani, A., Handjaras, G., Bottari, D. & Orzan, E. (2024). Early assessment of communicative competence in children with hearing loss using the Child-Caregiver Communication Assessment through Rebesco’s Evaluation (CC-CARE) method. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology. 111927. https://10.1016/j.ijporl.2024.111927
- Saksida, A., Rebesco, R., Colombani, A., Pintonello, S., Tonon, E., Santoro, AM. and Orzan, E. (2024) The timeline of non-vocal and vocal communicative skills in infants with hearing loss. Front. Pediatr.11:1209754. https://doi:10.3389/fped.2023.1209754
- Colombani, A., Saksida, A., Pavani, F., & Orzan, E. (2022). Symbolic and deictic gestures as a tool to promote parent-child communication in the context of hearing loss: a systematic review. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology,165 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijporl.2022.111421
Pia Gehlbach
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
pia.gehlbach@uni-goettingen.de
Pia Gehlbach works on iconicity and semantic conceptualization in sign language with a focus on German Sign Language. She holds a B.A. in English Philology and General Linguistics and a M.A. in English with a linguistic focus, both from the Georg-August-University of Göttingen where she now works as a member of the Sign Language Lab at the Department of German Philology. She is a member of the RTG 2070 Understanding Social Relationships. In her PhD project, she investigates the influence of sign language iconicity on the semantic conceptualization of various types of concepts, combining corpus-data analysis with an experimental approach. Her project aims at providing a systematic overview of the iconicity of the investigated signs, as well as to examine if, and how, this iconicity has an impact on the way in which a concept is semantically conceptualized.
Jonas Hartke
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
jhartke@posteo.de
Jonas Hartke holds a B.A. in German Philology and Protestant Religion and a M.A. in German Philology, both from the Georg-August-University of Göttingen. His main research interests are the semantics-pragmatics interface, gestures and pragmatic phenomena like irony and lies. At the moment he studies German Philology and Protestant Religion in the Master of Education.
Katja Jasinskaja
(Associate Member)
University of Cologne
katja.jasinskaja@uni-koeln.de
Iconicity, i.e. similarity between form and content, is present in visual communication to greater extent than it is in spoken and written language, and recent theoretical work on iconicity is largely based on the study of sign languages, gesture, and pictorial language. I am currently developing a research agenda whose goal is to study temporal iconicity in narrative discourse – the way the order and duration of events in the story are represented by the order and duration of utterances that report those events. The iconic representation of the order of events is probably the most standard example of iconicity in non-visual communication, and the extension of the idea to other temporal characteristics of events is the main new contribution of the envisaged research.
Selected publications
Jasinskaja, K. (2024). Discourse Time is Real. Talk presented at the Workshop Incremental constructions within and across languages at the 35th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information, ESSLLI 2024. https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008461. Leuven, Belgium.
Jasinskaja, K. and F. Zickenheiner (2024). “Speech acts that support other speech acts”. https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008455.
Jasinskaja, K. and E. Karagjosova (2020). “Rhetorical relations”. In: The Companion to Semantics. Ed. by D. Gutzmann, L. Matthewson, C. Meier, H. Rullmann, and T. E. Zimmermann. Oxford: Wiley.
Jasinskaja, K. (2013a). “Corrective Elaboration”. In: Lingua 132, pp. 51–66.
Jasinskaja, K. (2013b). “Iconic update”. In: Znaki czy nie znaki. Ed. by M. Guławska-Gawkowska and G. Zeldowicz. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, pp. 87–114.
Jasinskaja, K. and A. Rossdeutscher (2012). “Through Narrative Planning Towards the Preverbal Message: A DRT-based Approach”. In: Constraints in Discourse 3: Representing and inferring discourse structure. Ed. by A. Benz, P. Kühnlein, and M. Stede. John Benjamins, pp. 45–76.
Jasinskaja, K. (2010). “Modelling Discourse Relations by Topics and Implicatures: The Elaboration Default”. In: Constraints in Discourse 2. Ed. by A. Benz, P. Kühnlein, and C. Sidner. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 61–79.
Jasinskaja, K. and A. Rossdeutscher (2008). “Towards Generating Narratives from a Preverbal Message: A DRT-based approach”. In: Constraints in Discourse 3. Proceedings of the Workshop. Ed. by A. Benz, P. Kühnlein, and M. Stede. University of Potsdam. Potsdam, Germany, pp. 45–52.
Zeevat, H. and K. Jasinskaja (2007). “And as an additive particle”. In: Language, Representation and Reasoning. Memorial volume to Isabel Gómez Txurruka. Ed. by M. Aurnague, K. Korta, and J. M. Larrazabal. University of the Basque Country Press, pp. 315–340.
Marianthi Koraka
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
marianthi.koraka@uni-goettingen.de
Marianthi works on sign languages and holds a special interest in the aspect of modality effects. She completed her BA and MA studies at the University of Ioannina, Greece and in her MA thesis she explored word order in GSL in simple declarative sentences and in wh-questions. In her PhD project, she investigates imperative speech acts in Greek Sign Language (GSL) and German Sign Language (DGS) by using elicitation and judgement tasks. Through her project she aims to discover which strategies -morphosyntactic and prosodic- are employed in sign languages for the articulation of imperative speech acts and define the contribution of particular manual and non-manual elements. One of her research goals is to find whether sign languages possess a particular sentence type for the expression of directive constructions, similar to the one we call “Imperative” in spoken languages, and how it can be defined by applying specific diagnostics.
Rui Liu
(Associate Member)
Ghent University
rui.liu@ugent.be
Rui Lui works as a postdoc researcher at Ghent University (PI: Lara Bardi). Rui studies human communication with eye/motion-tracking, M/EEG, fMRI, psychopharmacology, and social network analysis. She is now combing experimental semiotic paradigms and EEG hyperscanning to examine behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying real-time interpersonal adjustment during conventionalization of partner-specific communication system. She obtained her PhD at Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging under the supervision of Ivan Toni. During her PhD study, she was investigating perception and production of communicative action. She is also working with Wim Pouw at Dynamic Signs and Signals group (DYNAMOS) at Donders, where they are investigating distinct manual kinematic signatures that speakers and signers used for communication.
Selected publications
- Liu, R., Bardi, L., (2024) Interpersonal synergy in co-constructing shared conceptual space. 7th European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN): Ghent, Belgium.
- Liu, R,. Pouw, W., Goldin-Meadow, S., Brentari, D. (preprint) Signers and speakers show distinct temporal kinematic signatures in their manual communicative movements. PsyArXiv.
- Liu, R., Stolk, A., de Boer, M., Oostenveld, R. & Toni, I. (preprint) Oxytocin facilitates communicative adjustment by upregulating broadband aperiodic neural activity. PsyArXiv. doi: 10.31234/osf.io/kq9g6
- Liu, R., Bögels, S., Bird, G., Medendorp, W.P. & Toni, I. (2021) Hierarchical Integration of Communicative and Spatial Perspective-Taking Demands in Sensorimotor Control of Referential Pointing. Cognitive Science. 46(1). doi: 10.1111/cogs.13084
- Liu, R., Yuan, X., Chen, K., Jiang, Y. & Zhou. W. (2018) Perception of social interaction compresses subjective duration in an oxytocin-dependent manner. eLife 7:e32100.
Matteo Maran
(Associate Member)
Donders Center for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen
matteo.maran@donders.ru.nl
Matteo Maran is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Donders Center for Cognition (DCC) at Radboud University (Nijmegen, The Netherlands). He is a member of the Speech Perception in Audiovisual Communication (SPEAC) research group, funded by the ERC Starting Grant ‘HearingHands’ (101040276; PI: Hans Rutger Bosker) that started in September 2022. He works on the audiovisual integration of gestural timing with spoken prosody in neurotypical and autistic individuals. Matteo Maran has a background in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and psycholinguistics, obtained during his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the University of Padova (Padova, Italy) and his PhD project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig, Germany).
Selected publications
- Maran, M., Friederici, A. D., & Zaccarella, E. (2022). Syntax through the looking glass: A review on two-word linguistic processing across behavioral, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 142, 104881. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104881
- Maran, M., Numssen, O., Hartwigsen, G., & Zaccarella, E. (2022). Online neurostimulation of Broca’s area does not interfere with syntactic predictions: A combined TMS-EEG approach to basic linguistic combination. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 968836. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.968836
- Pyatigorskaya*, E., Maran*, M., & Zaccarella, E. (2023). Testing the automaticity of syntax using masked visual priming. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2023.2173790
- Van Der Burght*, C. L., Friederici*, A. D., Maran*, M., Papitto*, G., Pyatigorskaya*, E., Schroen*, J., Trettenbrein*, P. C., & Zaccarella*, E. (2022). Cleaning up the Brickyard: How Theory and Methodology Shape Experiments in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6zpjq
Chiara Marchetiello
(Associate Member)
The GestuGram Lab, Trinity College Dublin
marchtetc@tcd.ie
Chiara Marchetiello is a PhD student in Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin. Her doctoral project The Syntax of Gestures in the Local Languages of Campania is funded by Trinity’s Provost’s PhD Project Award awarded to the research project Gestural Grammar: Investigating Gestures in Southern Italy (GestuGram) led by Prof Valentina Colasanti. Chiara’s dissertation aims to provide new insights on the grammatical integration of gestures using as empirical base the gestural inventories of the languages spoken in Campania region (e.g., Neapolitan, Torrese, Acerrano, etc.).
Chiara is primarily interested in theoretical syntax and its interfaces with semantics and phonology, with particular focus on Romance languages (especially the Italo-Romance subfamily of languages). Her research interests include negation and negative concord, the structure of nominals and vocatives, epistemic modality, and discourse markers.
Selected publications (seminar and conference talks, peer-reviewed abstracts)
- In press. Colasanti, Valentina and Chiara Marchetiello. Gesture and information structure: a case study on topic markers in Southern Italo-Romance. Italian Journal of Linguistics.
- 2025. Gestures of negation: True or false? Talk to be given at the Formal Linguistics Approaches to Multimodality (FLAMM), Trinity College Dublin, 4th December.
- 2025. Co-speech [PDO] is an epistemic gestural marker in Campania: end of discussion! Talk given at the Linguistics Research Seminars, Trinity College Dublin, 11 November 2025.
- 2025. Parasitic licensing in the visual-gestural modality, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, 4 September 2025, University of Suffolk, UK.
- 2025. Some initial thoughts on the syntax of gestures in the languages of Campania. Talk given at the Romance Linguistics Circle (RoLinC), University of Cambridge, 11 March 2025.
Josiah Nii Ashie Neequaye
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
josiah.neequaye@uni-goettingen.de
Josiah Nii Ashie Neequaye works on iconicity, with special focus on ideophones and their interaction with other iconic enrichments such as gestures. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Linguistics, and his Master’s degree in Linguistics, both at the University of Ghana. He is a doctoral researcher in the RTG 2636: “Form-Meaning Mismatches” at the University of Göttingen. His PhD project generally explores the interaction between ideophones and co-speech gestures in Ga (Kwa, Niger-Congo), and how these (conventionalized) ideophone-accompanying gestures compare with ideophone-like expressions in sign language.
Selected publications
- Asiedu, Prince, Mavis Boateng Asamoah, Kathryn Barnes, Reginald Duah, Cornelia Ebert, Josiah Nii Ashie Neequaye, Yvonne Portele, and Theresa Stender. “On the information status of ideophones in Akan.” In Annual Conference of African Languages, vol. 45. 2023.
Babajide Owoyele
(Associate Member)
Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Rotterdam, The Netherlands & Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam
owoyele@drift.eur.nl, babajide.owoyele@hpi.de
Babajide Owoyele is a design scientist who uses multimodal analysis to explore challenges at the intersection of computer science and innovation research. He is a PhD candidate at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences (Prof Derk Loorbach) and a research associate at the Hasso Plattner Institute, supervised by Prof Gerard de Melo at the Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Systems Group. His thesis at DRIFT explores leveraging design science and multimodal data to map triadic collaboration dynamics in multi-actor constellations at the (1) macro-level (inter-organizational networks) and at the micro level (teams engage in ideation). As part of the Envisionbox.org team, he is exploring how to make audio-visual data archiving and analytics more accessible to early career researchers and data stewards.
Babajide earned his Master’s degree in Global Production Engineering (Solar Technology) from the Technical University of Berlin in 2017, alongside a degree in Climate Knowledge and Systemic Innovation from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). His research and professional experience include positions at the Wuppertal Institute, ESA BIC, and several startups. Babajide holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria.
Selected publications
- Babajide Alamu Owoyele, Martin Schilling, Rohan Sawahn, Niklas Kaemer, Pavel Zherebenkov, Bhuvanesh Verma, Wim Pouw, Gerard de Melo (preprint (2024)). “MaskAnyone Toolkit: Offering Strategies for Minimizing Privacy Risks and Maximizing Utility in Audio-Visual Data Archiving.” arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.03185
- Babajide Owoyele, Bhuvanesh Verma, Victor Omolaoye, Jonathan Antonio Edelman, Derk Loorbach, Gerard de Melo (preprint (2024)). “Socio-Semantic X-Ray of Multi-Actor Constellations using Topics and Interstitial Authors: A Toolkit for Augmenting Computational Literature Reviews.” SSRN. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4713155
- Babajide Owoyele, James Trujillo, Gerard de Melo, Wim Pouw. “Masked-Piper (2022). Masking personal identities in visual recordings while preserving multimodal information.” SoftwareX, Volume 20, 101236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2022.101236
Lara Pearson
(Associate Member)
University of Cologne
lpearson@uni-koeln.de
Lara Pearson is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Institute of Musicology, University of Cologne. Her work explores gesture, vocalization and interaction in music-related contexts, with a focus on the performance and pedagogical practices of Karnatak vocalists in South India. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, combining methods from gesture studies, ethnomusicology, computational musicology and human movement science. In addition to her work on music and gesture, she has published on coarticulation in music, cross-cultural aesthetics, music notation and concepts of improvisation. She is currently Vice-Chair of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance Study Group on Sound, Movement and the Sciences (ICTMD SoMoS).
- Pearson, L. (in press). Adjusting to the Other: Audiencing Through Gesture in Karnatak Vocal Lessons. Journal of the Royal Musical Association.
- Pearson, L., & Pouw, W. (2022). Gesture–Vocal Coupling in Karnatak Music Performance: A Neuro–bodily Distributed Aesthetic Entanglement. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1515(1), 219–236. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14806
- Pearson, L. (2022). Inscription, Gesture, and Social Relations: Notation in Karnatak Music. In E. Payne & F. Schuiling (Eds.), Material Cultures of Music Notation: New Perspectives on Musical Inscription (pp. 139–151). Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429342837-13
- Pearson, L. (2016). Coarticulation and Gesture: An Analysis of Melodic Movement in South Indian Raga Performance. Music Analysis, 35 (3), 280-313. https://doi.org/10.1111/musa.12071
- Pearson, L. (2013). Gesture and the Sonic Event in Karnatak Music. Empirical Musicology Review, 8 (1), 2-14. https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v8i1.3918
Vanessa Wing Yan Tsang
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
wingyan.tsang@uni-goettingen.de
Vanessa Tsang works on spatial constructions and iconicity in the visual modality, with a major focus on sign languages. She completed her BA studies in Linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and then her MA in Linguistics at the University of Cologne. Currently, she is a doctoral student of the RTG 2636 “Form-meaning mismatches” at the University of Göttingen. Her project compares event description of motion and speed in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) and German Sign Language (DGS), with the aim of investigating the language-specific properties and sign-gesture interface of classifier constructions. At a later stage, gestural productions are included for a more holistic examination of the modality-specific features of motion representations in the visual modality.