Mingyuan Chu

Broadly speaking, my research interests are psycholinguistics and spatial cognition. In particular, I am interested in studying mechanisms underlying the production of spontaneous hand gestures, and the role of gestures in spatial thinking and learning. Research questions I am interested in include how gesture relates to speech production and comprehension, how communicative context (e.g., face-to-face conversation vs. monologue) and topic (e.g., spatial vs. non-spatial) affects gesture production, and how gesture reveals and facilitates the spatial thinking and learning processes.

I am also interested in studying individual differences in gesture production from various cognitive and social perspectives, including individuals’ spatial and verbal skills, working memory capacity, central executive functions, personalities and empathy capacity.

Recently, I have started to investigate gesture-speech coordination by using virtual reality technology.