It was such a pleasure to help organize #ISGS10 in Nijmegen! Some photo highlights from talks on tools & educational resources for kinematic analysis of gesture, the role of gesture in narrative recall in typical & ayptical aging w/ @martinamellana.bsky.social, & multiparty audience design in TBI.

Excited to present at ISGS25 this Thursday morning in Nijmegen!
Together with @shariceclough.bsky.social , we’ll be sharing our work on the role of gesture in narrative recall across Alzheimer’s, MCI, and healthy aging.
Looking forward to great discussions! 💪🏻🧠🗣️
#ISGS25

Sharing a fun science outreach experience! At OFF TOPIC pub in Turin, in collaboration with CentroScienza, I served up some science bites about multimodal communication to diners who ordered from my special menu! 🗯️🍻

Excited to share this viewpoint on why studying group audience design processes in TBI can lead to new clinical and scientific insights about communication difficulties after brain injury. Will be followed up soon w/ empirical papers examining adaptation across speech, gesture, and gaze modalities!

Our recent paper led by Demet Özer with Aslı Özyürek! @asliozyurek.bsky.social @kudilvebilis.bsky.social

Spatial working memory is critical for gesture processing: Evidence from gestures with varying semantic links to speech
link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Finally submitted my Master’s thesis carried out at @mpi-nl.bsky.social with @shariceclough.bsky.social ! 🎉🥳
We found that individuals with MCI rely on the gesture modality as a meaningful communicative resource and that information conveyed through gesture remained stable over time.

A recent scoping review by Rossella Muò et al. highlights the importance of training healthcare students to be competent communication partners as a crucial component of the rehabilitation process for people with communication disorders.

doi.org/10.1080/0963...

Preliminary results show nonlinguistic strategies, including gestures, can be leveraged in rehabilitation to improve functional communication in global aphasia.

doi.org/10.1111/1460...

How do we understand each other in conversation? A thread based on my recent IACS4 plenary, covering a critical perspective on interactive linguistic alignment - the tendency to re-use each other's linguistic forms. 1/

The Nijmegen Lectures 2025 have started with the first talk by Victor S. Ferreira: 'Toward a Mechanistic Understanding of Audience Design'. You can watch it via this live stream: weblectures.ru.nl/permalink/l1... @fernandaedi.bsky.social #NijmegenLectures

A little sneak peak of results that are forthcoming in a preprint soon: the mechanism by which semantic feature analysis appeared to improve correct naming on 30 treated nouns for n=19 participants w aphasia appeared to be by improving inner speech for those items. Thanks to NIDILRR for funding.