IMPRS DOCTORAL DEFENCE: Sho Akamine

The public defence is open to all interested persons.

Unless otherwise noted, defences are held at the Aula (Senaatszaal/auditorium) of the Radboud University. A livestream is also available.

To obtain a digital/printed copy of the thesis, please get in touch with the doctoral candidate.

Why do we repeat each other’s gestures in conversation?

When we talk with each other, we do much more than exchange words. We take turns with short gaps or overlaps, we gesture, and we tend to use similar word choices, sentence structures, and gestures. It has long been known that this mirroring or alignment of language helps communication run smoothly, and that people automatically and strategically repeat each other's words in conversation. What is far less understood is whether the same holds for gesture.

This dissertation investigates why we repeat each other's gestures in conversation and how alignment in words and alignment in gestures are connected. To tackle these questions, it analyses existing recordings of people communicating about novel objects, builds and validates a new computational framework for measuring how similar two gestures look, and conducts an experiment to test what drives gestural alignment in the first place.

Taken together, the studies show that people repeat each other's word choices and gestures throughout their conversations, that people are automatically influenced to produce gestures with similar meaning, and that alignment in gestures is closely tied to alignment in word choices. Overall, alignment is a natural part of how we talk, and understanding why it happens and how it helps conversation sheds light on how we use language and understand each other.

Sho Akamine was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1995. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in British and American Language and Culture at Okinawa International University (Dean's Award) in 2019, then completed a Master's degree in Linguistics (with distinction) at California State University, Fresno, in 2021. He secured a highly competitive IMPRS PhD Fellowship to conduct his PhD research in the Multimodal Language Department and the Psychology of Language Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, which he started in January 2022 and completed in March 2026. Beyond his research, he served on the IMPRS Conference 2024 organizing committee, led the MLD statistics focus group, and designed and taught the IMPRS Bayesian multilevel regression course.