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I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Nijmegen. My research focuses on how people use and process multimodal language (i.e., speech + visual bodily signals) during face-to-face conversation. I use a combination of (quantitative) conversational corpus analyses, behavioural experiments, virtual reality and EEG studies.
My personal website can be found here.
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My PhD
In my PhD, I investigated how seeing communicative hand gestures facilitates language processing during conversation, under supervision of dr. Linda Drijvers and dr. Judith Holler. I focused on hand gestures that depict meaning (for example, pretending to type with two hands in the air to depict the concept of typing). I showed that seeing such hand gestures helps listeners to respond more rapidly to questions (good, because in conversation fast responses are the norm and slow responses are meaningful!). I was also interested in why these gestures speed up responses, and showed that this may (partly) be explained by gestures improving predictions of upcoming words.
The full text of my PhD thesis titled “On how gestures facilitate prediction and fast responding during conversation” can be found under Publications.
Previous education
I obtained a Bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from University College Utrecht. Here, I majored in mathematics and cognitive neuroscience, with a minor in psychology and additional courses in linguistics. With this interdisciplinary background, I moved on to do the Cognitive Neuroscience master's at Radboud University Nijmegen, specializing in Language and Communication. I did my master's internship in the Multimodal Language Department, where I studied the link between how people describe events using speech and gesture, and how they remember those events.
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