Maria Graziano

More than words: the role of gestures in communication and language development

I am Associate Professor of linguistics and Pedagogical Developer at Lund University Humanities Lab. I’m originally from Italy, and before coming to Sweden, I have done research in France, The Netherlands and Canada. I study how people use gestures when they talk, and how children learn to use gestures together with speech while telling a story.

Gestures are the movements we naturally make with our hands while talking. They are not random movements or embellishment for speech; they are part of language, tightly connected to our words, and can convey meanings that we don’t express in speech. Gestures are used in every culture, but this doesn’t mean that they are the same or used in the same manner everywhere. In fact, there are cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences in the use of gestures. Babies can use them even before they can speak; but just like leaning to speak, children must figure out how to use gestures together with the linguistic means to express more complex ideas.

I’m especially interested in studying gestures because this means of communication has been ignored for a long time in linguistics; instead, gestures are an integral component of spoken discourse and can reveal interesting aspects of language and its development that we would not catch if we considered only speech. I would love to share my research on how people from different cultures, like Italians and Swedes, use gestures while speaking. I would also be happy to talk about my research on how children learn to combine gestures and speech when they tell a story.

Om besöket är på plats kan jag komma till

Lund, Malmö

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Lunds universietet

Humanities Lab

Läs mer om min forskning

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