In my research I study the development of multimodal discourse across the lifespan. I examine the changing functions of co-speech gestures as children become collaborative conversationalists. Because language is much more than just speech, my work approaches language development as fundamentally multimodal as well. Why and when do children use gestures before words? What kinds of nonverbal messages are children sending when they speak? As adults, do we notice?

As an assistant professor of instruction in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences and as a graduate of the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, I share a commitment to an interdisciplinary research approach to the study of communicative development. Using a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous parent-child interaction, my work combines elements of conversation analysis with formal speech and gesture coding to investigate how the tools of cooperative conversation change over development.