Madeline Nicol, former Ohio State Marion student and spring 2018 graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, recently presented research at the CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference in Boulder, CO.
The project was work she began as part of her senior thesis when she was a student at Ohio State Marion working with faculty research mentor Dr. Nikole Patson.
Nicol's project investigates how gestures influence people's interpretations of plural nouns. She found that if you make a big gesture when saying something like "apples" people imagine you are talking about a lot of apples. However, if you make a small gesture, it does not lead them to imagine a small set of apples.
According to Ohio State Marion Associate Professor of Psychology, Dr. Nicole Patson, she plans follow up this work with her former student to figure out exactly what aspect of the plural the gesture is influencing. For example, the gesture could be causing people to imagine the speaker is talking about a lot of things, or it could be causing people to imagine that the objects are really spread out.