Sho Akamine

I'm a postdoc in the Multimodal Language Department studying how people use speech and gesture to establish mutual understanding in a task-based communicative interaction on Zoom. In particular, I aim to understand the roles of visual cues in conceptual alignment (having similar mental representations between speakers) and behavioral alignment (repeating some aspects of speech and gestures between speakers), and how the alignment contributes to successful communication.
 

Previous education

I obtained a Bachelor's degree in British and American Language and Culture at Okinawa International University, Okinawa, Japan (2019). During my Bachelor's studies, I spent one year studying experimental psychology at Irvine Valley College in Orange County, CA. Afterwards, I completed my MA in Linguistics at California State University, Fresno (2021), during which I specialized in general linguistics and psycholinguistics. I completed my PhD at the MPI under the supervision of Prof. Aslı Özyürek, Prof. Antje Meyer, and Prof. Mark Dingemanse.

Coding resources

Akamine, S. (2025). Tutorial on using dynamic time warping (DTW) for quantifying the degree of gesture form similarity. https://github.com/ShoAkamine/dtw-tutorial

Akamine, S. (2025). WhisperX tutorial for language sciences. https://github.com/ShoAkamine/whisperx_tutorial

Pouw, W., & Akamine, S. (2025). Using Media-Pipe for full-body tracking, masking, blurring, and movement tracing. https://github.com/WimPouw/envisionBOX_modulesWP/tree/main/Mediapipe_Optional_Masking

Teaching

Main instructor: IMPRS Bayesian regression. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Fall 2025 & Spring 2026.

Curriculum Vitae

You can obtain more information through my CV.