Scholar

Tom Williamson

H-index: 15
Political science 37%
Environmental science 12%
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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)
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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!
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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
LAGB 2025 - University of Suffolk
www.lagb.org.uk
trwilliamson.bsky.social
For sure! Perhaps I can share the data to help train the model when I'm done!
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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...!!
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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.
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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!!
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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!!
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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 :)
trwilliamson.bsky.social
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!!

Reposted by: Tom Williamson

lagbpsc.bsky.social
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!
Fundamentals of Getting a Job as a Linguist - Careers Talk Series
YouTube video by LAGB Postgraduate Student Committee
www.youtube.com

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Fields & subjects

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