Anita Slonimska

My work brings together multimodality (speech, gesture, and sign languages), pragmatics, and language evolution, using both experimental and corpus-based methods to explore the adaptive, semiotically rich nature of human language structure, use, and processing. I study how speakers and signers exploit the affordances of the visual modality — including multiple bodily articulators and iconicity — to adapt their communication across different contexts, in both spoken and signed languages. I am particularly interested in how linguistic systems, and their adaptive nature, may reflect evolutionary pressures toward communicative efficiency.

My current research focuses on (1) how speakers and signers flexibly draw on the temporal and spatial dimensions of language to optimize communication in context, with a particular focus on child-directed versus adult-directed communication, and (2) the extent to which the visual modality's affordances shape prediction and integration in language comprehension.

I hold a PhD in Linguistics (cum laude) from Radboud University in the Netherlands. The majority of my doctoral research was carried out as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Early Stage Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies, CNR–Rome (Italy). My doctoral work opened a new line of research examining how the affordances of the visual modality shape communicative efficiency.