Congratulations to Kirsty Green on passing her viva! Kirsty’s PhD, supervised by Prof. Sotaro Kita, explored how iconicity - when a word or gesture resembles what it means - supports early communication. She found caregivers using iconic words sparked greater engagement from infants.

Excited to share my first PhD article, published in Scientific Data 👉 rdcu.be/eIRqD We present the Shared Book Reading Corpus: 44 caregiver-infant dyads, 3 camera views (headcams + overview), speech transcriptions & developmental measures. Access on Databrary for discovery & reuse! ✨ #OpenScience

Just submitted my thesis. Feels momentous!

I've enjoyed the Child Language Symposium at the University of Reading. It was especially fun to present my work on the iconicity advantage for young children learning onomatopoeia as part of our Iconicity Symposium @suzanneaussems.bsky.social @cyberming.bsky.social @cathelaing.bsky.social

Really enjoyed presenting this talk at ISGS10 in Nijmegen. Some great discussions with people and lots of lovely feedback 🙂 @isgs2025.bsky.social

I presented my latest work on whether young children benefit from iconicity when learning novel onomatopoeia at the EPS meeting in Lancaster last week (spoiler -they do!) Great conference, lovely people and excellent range of talks.

@thomhills.bsky.social looking chuffed with his baby: Behavioural Network Science: Language, Mind, Society. Go ask your library to stock this masterpiece!

In my paper with @mperlman.bsky.social and Sotaro Kita (published in Gesture last week benjamins.com/catalog/gest...) we show that infants can create their own iconic gestures, producing their first iconic gesture between 12 and 20 months! Gestures varied in level of conceptual difficulty.

My first article has been published online in Gesture today. Take a look if you're interested in iconic gestures and caregiver- infant interactions 😁 www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

🎉 Big news! I'm submitting my PhD thesis this September! 📝✨ It's been a wild ride of research, resilience, and way too many snacks to fuel me, and now I’m officially on the hunt for my next adventure. 🚀