Interests: Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology. Gestures that spontaneously accompany speaking and thinking, Development of language and gesture in children, Relationship between spatial language and cognition, Sound symbolism. Personal Home Page Contact Details

Representative Publications:

• Aussems, S., & Kita, S. (in press). Seeing iconic gesture promotes first- and second-order verb generalization in preschoolers. Child Development. https://dx.doi/org/10.1111/cdev.13392Link opens in a new window (Open Access)
• Imai, M., & Kita, S. (2014). The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1651). http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0298Link opens in a new window Open Access accepted version: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/65926/Link opens in a new window
• Senghas, A., Kita, S., & Özyürek, A. (2004). Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science, 305(5697), 1779-1782. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1100199Link opens in a new window Open Access Pre-Print: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66237/Link opens in a new window 
• Kita, S., & Özyürek, A. (2003). What does cross-linguistic variation in semantic coordination of speech and gesture reveal?: Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and speaking. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 16-32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00505-3Link opens in a new window Open Access accepted version: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66232/Link opens in a new window 
• Fritz, I., Kita, S., Littlemore, J., & Krott, A. (2021). Multimodal language processing: How preceding discourse constrains gesture interpretation and affects gesture integration when gestures do not synchronise with semantic affiliates. Journal of Memory and Language, 117, 104191. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104191Link opens in a new window Open Access accepted version: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/144061/Link opens in a new window
• Kita, S., Alibali, M. W., & Chu, M. (2017). How Do Gestures Influence Thinking and Speaking? The Gesture-for-Conceptualization Hypothesis. Psychological Review, 124(3), 245-266. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000059Link opens in a new window Open Access accepted version: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/84187/Link opens in a new window
  

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Supervisor to:
Kirsty Green
Ying Guo
Mingtong Li
Melissa Reddy