Welcome to the Castellucci Lab at URochester

Speech is almost always accompanied by gestures of the hands, face, head, torso, etc. These co-speech gestures aren’t just “fidgets” or probabilistic “add-ons” to spoken language – instead, they are semantically linked with what’s being said and coupled at a kinematic level with speech articulation itself. We also gesture when our conversational partners can’t see us, and people born blind gesture when they’re speaking. This all points to gesture being fundamentally entangled with the cognitive and motor pathways that govern language…but how does that actually work in the human mind and brain?

Research in the lab tackles this question in an integrative fashion, and we use neural and behavioral approaches to investigate the biological basis of multimodal communication (i.e., simultaneous speech/vocalization and gesture). Our research is primarily focused on production, and our experiments seek to understand how humans go about planning speech and gesture at the same time and how our motor systems coordinate the multiple effectors (i.e., body parts) that constitute these behaviors – and what happens when these processes are disrupted.

While multimodal signalling is a key feature of human communication, it is not unique to us; instead, multi-effector displays consisting of vocalization and ‘gestural’ actions have independently evolved in many species. By examining these nonhuman behaviors, our lab seeks to gain a holistic view of human communication – what features set it apart from other species, what evolutionary pressures shaped our social systems, and what generalizable neural and behavioral algorithms exist for coordinating vocalization and nonvocal movements into coherent communicative acts.