Teaching Fellows

Natalie R. Dowling’s research concerns nonverbal and extralinguistic coordination in face-to-face interaction and how these conversational tools develop from infancy to adulthood. Dowling studies the development of multimodal discourse across the lifespan, examining the changing functions of co-speech gestures as children become collaborative conversationalists. Her work approaches language development as fundamentally multimodal: Why and when do children use gestures before words? What kinds of nonverbal messages are children sending when they speak? As adults, do we notice? 

Learn more about Dowling here.