Sotaro Kita

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Sotaro Kita (喜多 壮太郎, Kita Sōtarō, born 1963) is a professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Warwick.^[1] Kita's work focuses on the psycholinguistic properties of gestures accompanying speech, relations between spatial language and cognition, language development, and sound symbolism.

Biography[]

Kita received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1993, working in the lab of David McNeill.^[2] His dissertation focused on spontaneous gestures and Japanese mimetics.^[3] From 1993-2003 Kita led the Gesture Project at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, one of the research foci of the MPI.^[4]

From April 2017, Kita has served as the editor of GESTURE (published by John Benjamins).^[5] Kita was president of the from 2012–2014, and vice-president from 2010-2012.^[6]

Kita's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation,^[7] the Leverhulme Trust,^[8] and other agencies.

Appointments[]

• 1993-2003 Led the Gesture Project at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
• 1993-1994 Postdoctoral Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
• 1994-2003 Senior Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
• 2003-2006 Senior Lecturer at the Dept. of Experimental Psychology in the University of Bristol
• 2006-2013 Reader at the School of Psychology in the University of Birmingham
• 2013–present Professor of Psychology of Language at University of Warwick

Books[]

• Kita, S. (2002). Jesuchaa: kangaeru karada [Gesture: the body that thinks]. Kaneko Shobo.
• Kita, S. (Ed.) (2003). Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet. Psychology Press

Selected publications[]

• Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2011). The nature of gestures' beneficial role in spatial problem solving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(1), 102-115. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021790
• Imai, M., Kita, S., Nagumo, M., & Okada, H. (2008). Sound symbolism between a word and an action facilitates early verb learning. Cognition, 109(1), 54-65. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015
• Kita, S. (1997). Two-dimensional semantic analysis of Japanese mimetics. Linguistics, 35, 379-415. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1997.35.2.379
• 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. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00505-3
• Mumford, K. H., & Kita, S. (2014). Children Use Gesture to Interpret Novel Verb Meanings. Child Development, 85(3), 1181-1189. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12188
• 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. https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1100199 Open Access Pre-Print: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66237/

External links[]

• Sotaro Kita's Warwick University homepage
• Sotaro Kita publications indexed by Google Scholar

References[]