Mercator Fellow

Sotaro Kita is Professor of Psychology of Language at the University of Warwick, in the UK. After a bachelor’s degree in mathematical engineering and a master’s degree in information engineering from University of Tokyo. He obtained a PhD in linguistics and psychology from the University of Chicago. Immediately after his PhD, he laid a foundation for gesture research in Nijmegen; he established and led the “Gesture Project” at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Netherlands, from 1993 to 2003. Then, he held a faculty position at University of Bristol and University of Birmingham, before joining University of Warwick. He served as the President of the International Society of Gesture Studies and also as the Editor of the journal, GESTURE.  His research primarily concerns the interplay among gesture, language and cognition.

He played a key role in establishing research on gesture as an important part of psycholinguistics.  He has investigated how gesture relates to various aspects of language: motion events (Kita & Özyürek, 2003, Journal of Memory and Language), metaphor (Argyriou, Mohr & Kita, 2017, JEP: Learning, Memory and Cognition), and discourse contexts (Friz, Kita, Littlemore, & Krott, 2021, Journal of Memory and Language). He has also investigated how gesture varies cross-culturally (Kita, 2009, Language and Cognitive Processes), and how gesture production shapes gesturer’s conceptualization for speaking and thinking (Kita, Alibali, & Chu, 2017, Psychological Review).

He has also investigated the role of gesture in language development and spatial cognition. For example, he showed that deaf Nicaraguan children turned gesture into an emerging sign language (Senghas, Kita & Özyürek, 2004, Science) and that children learn a novel word better when they see an adult’s gesture depicting the word referent (Aussems & Kita, 2021, Child Development).  He also showed that gesture production facilitates spatial cognition (Chu & Kita, 2011, JEP: General).