The pilot working group on Multimodality and/in Second Language Acquisition is bringing Marianne Gullberg (Lund University) to OSU to talk about her psycholinguistic research on gesture and language development. In her talk, ‘Why gestures are not (only) a compensatory device – evidence from language learners’, Prof Gullberg challenges the assumption that gestures are compensatory in nature and help speakers convey information they have difficulties expressing, facilitate lexical retrieval, and help speakers to solve cognitive problems. By looking at disfluencies and bimodal information structure in child and adult learner data, she shows that gestures are co-ordinated with fluent speech, not with disfluencies; that when gestures are recruited to compensate, different problems have different gestural solutions; and that children and adults generally express similar information bimodally. The working group is funded by the Humanities Institute and led by Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm and me. Prof Gullberg’s talk is Wednesday, April 2 from 4-6 at the Humanities Institute, 104 East 15th.