Main

Welcome to the
‘Brain Imaging of Multimodal
Communication in Development’
project website!

We are a research team working at the Multimodal Language and Cognition Group at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University situated in the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.

Kimberley, Kazuki, Christina, Melissa, Asli and Judith

When you click this link, you can see a video of Sofia who participated in our research study.
Sofia tells you about how she experienced her time with us, and what she had to do.
This video was made by Sofia’s father, Roy van Veen.

Our current project is funded by the EU Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020 – Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (2016 – 2018).

Children learn language in a multimodal environment in the sense that their caregivers interact with children in a variety of modalities such as eye gaze, gesture, and speech. Especially hand gestures are often used by caregivers to convey information with speech. Given that gestures often carry information that the co-occurring speech does not convey, gestures are an important medium for children to understand speakers’ messages. This leads us to address the question of how children process a speaker’s gesture and speech.

In our current project we examine neurocognitive processing of semantic information from gesture and speech in children and adults by using neuroimaging techniques such as EEG (‘About our EEG experiment‘). This project will contribute to the research of multimodal communication by providing neurobiological data on how gesture and speech are processed in children and adults.

For more detailed information please click here (‘About our EEG experiment’).
If you would like to participate please click here (‘Participation’).
Please click here to read more about who is conducting this study (‘People’).

This research was approved by the Ethische Toetsingscommissie (ETC) Geesteswetenschappen Nijmegen.