Sotaro Kita

Sotaro Kita is a professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Warwick. Professor Kita's work focuses on the Psycholinguistics properties of co-speech gesture, the relationship between spatial language, developmental psychology and cognition and sound symbolism. Kita received his PhD from the University of Chicago, working in the lab of David McNeill. from 1993-2003 he led the Gesture Project at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, one of the research foci of the MPI.

From April 2017 he is the editor of GESTURE (published by John Benjamins of Amsterdam). From 2012–2014 he was the president of the International Society for Gesture Studies, and vice-president from 2010-2012.

• 1993-2003 Led the Gesture Project at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
• 1993-1994 Postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
• 1994-2003 Senior Research 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- Professor of Psychology of Language at Warwick University

• Mumford, K. H., & Kita, S. (2014). Children Use Gesture to Interpret Novel Verb Meanings. Child Development, 85(3), 1181-1189. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12188 Open Access accepted version: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/65784/
• Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2011). The nature of gestures' beneficial role in spatial problem solving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(1), 102-115. http://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. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015
• 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.1100199 Open Access Pre-Print: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66237/
• 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)00505-3 Open Access accepted version: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/66232/
• Kita, S. (2002). Jesuchaa: kangaeru karada [Gesture: the body that thinks]. Tokyo: Kaneko Shobo.