Dr Yan Gu
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Email
yan.gu@essex.ac.uk -
Telephone
+44 (0) 1206 874945
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Location
1.702C, Colchester Campus
Profile
Biography
I am a linguist and cognitive scientist working across communication, language, cognition, culture and digital media. My research examines how people use speech, gesture, prosody, facial expression, sign, writing, video and platform affordances to create meaning, and how these communicative resources shape interaction, learning, audience engagement, social evaluation and participation. My work is experimental, multimodal and data-driven. I combine behavioural studies, surveys, multimodal corpora, digital platform data, video-based archives, annotation and advanced statistical modelling. Across my projects, I ask how language and communication shape interaction, learning, cognition, cultural meaning, audience engagement, social evaluation and participation, including from cross-cultural, developmental and marginalised perspectives. Research Areas 1. Multimodal communication, meaning and audience design This strand examines how people use speech, gesture, prosody, facial expression, gaze, sign, writing and other semiotic resources to create meaning and adapt to different audiences. I study communication as a socially responsive practice shaped by listeners, relationships, identity, empathy, culture, developmental stage and interactional goals. This work includes research on child- and adult-directed communication, broadcast communication, classroom interaction, audience evaluation and multimodal social meaning. 2. Language, culture, cognition and semiotic diversity This strand investigates how language, culture and embodied experience shape meaning across spoken, signed, written, pictographic and digital modalities. A key focus is Chinese Sign Language, gesture, time, spatial cognition and culturally situated meaning-making. I am interested in how different semiotic systems organise thought and communication, and how cross-cultural and marginalised communicative practices are represented, interpreted and circulated. 3. Digital, platform and mediated communication This strand examines how communication is produced, circulated, evaluated and recorded in mediated and digital environments. Current work focuses on short-video platforms such as TikTok/Douyin, asking how creators use multimodal resources to perform identity, stance and personae, and how audiences respond through likes, comments, shares and other forms of engagement. I am also interested in how platform data, API access, sampling bias, digital archives and multimodal records shape what researchers can know about social behaviour and public communication. 4. Learning, migration and social participation This strand examines how communication shapes learning, development, social evaluation and access to opportunity. It includes work on children’s language learning, learner-generated multimodal videos, classroom communication, language attitudes, migration, public perception, signed-language access and language-related social outcomes. Across these projects, I ask how communicative resources influence learning, participation, judgement and inequality in educational, social and institutional contexts. If you are interested in doing an internship or working on a project with me, please drop me an email.
Qualifications
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PhD Communication and Information Science, Tilburg University, (2018)
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Research master Language & Communication Radboud & Tilburg University, (2012)
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Master of Linguistics Radboud University Nijmegen, (2011)
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BA English Language Education Nantong University, (2009)
Appointments
University of Essex
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Lecturer, University of Essex (1/4/2022 - present)
Other academic
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Honorary research fellow, University College London (1/4/2022 - present)
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Research fellow, University College London (1/9/2019 - 31/3/2022)
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Post doc, University College London (15/2/2018 - 31/8/2019)
Research and professional activities
Research interests
Perception of time
Child language acquisition
Language and thought
Immigrants and migration
Aging and pension planning
Language and economics
Cross-cultural / linguistics comparison
Multimodal communication
Gesture and prosody
Drug use and well-being
Chinese Sign Language
Teaching and supervision
Current teaching responsibilities
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Introduction to Personal Development and Employability (PS117)
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Applied Psychology (PS118)
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Developmental Psychology (PS406)
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Psychology of Global Challenges (PS424)
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Psychology in the Real World (PS516)
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MSc Psychology Research Project (PS900)
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Neurocognition of Human Interaction (PS935)
Current supervision
Publications
Publications (10)
Edwards, C., Cabiddu, F., Hill-Payne, H., Donnellan, E., Gu, Y. and Vigliocco, G., (2026). Verbal and non-verbal teaching behaviours jointly shape adult learning in naturalistic conversation
Edwards, C., Cabiddu, F., Hill-Payne, H., Donnellan, E., Gu, Y. and Vigliocco, G., (2026). Verbal and non-verbal teaching behaviours jointly shape adult learning in naturalistic conversation
Jordan-Barros, A., Cabiddu, F., Donnellan, E., Gu, Y. and Vigliocco, G., (2025). Caregivers’ multimodal actions scaffold word learning and vocabulary growth in the early years
Zheng, Y., Gu, Y. and van Soest, A., (2023). Beyond financial knowledge and IQ: The effect of temporal values on pension planning, homeownership and financial wealth of natives and immigrants in the Netherlands
Zheng, Y., Gu, Y., Backus, A. and van Soest, A., (2023). Host language proficiency has a causal effect on immigrants’ income, savings and financial wealth
Zheng, Y., Gu, Y. and van Soest, A., (2023). Time to get attention: The effect of temporal focus on health, income and happiness
Zheng, Y., LIN, HAO. and Gu, Y., (2023). The value of sign and print: Language proficiency predicts deaf signers’ occupational prestige and income
Zheng, Y., Gu, Y. and van Soest, A., (2023). Who is taking drugs and what are the consequences ?: Understanding influences of psychological and demographic factors on drug consumption and its impact on health, labour market performance and financial wealth
Shi, J., Gu, Y. and Vigliocco, G., (2022). Prosodic modulations in child-directed language and their impact on word learning
Motamedi, Y., Murgiano, M., Grzyb, B., Gu, Y., Kewenig, V., Brieke, R., Donnellan, E., Marshall, C., Wonnacott, E., Perniss, P. and Vigliocco, G., (2022). Language development beyond the here-and-now: iconicity and displacement in child-directed communication
Journal articles (15)
Bai, D. and Gu, Y., (2026). Harnessing Big Data, Hindered by Bias: Evaluating TikTok Research API for Fair and Optimal Social Sciences. Social Science Computer Review
Gu, Y., Donnellan, E., Grzyb, B., Brekelmans, G., Murgiano, M., Brieke, B., Perniss, P. and Vigliocco, G., (2025). The ECOLANG Multimodal Corpus of adult-child and adult-adult Language. Scientific Data. 12 (1), 89-
Callizo, C., Casasanto, D., Chahboun, S., Göksun, T., Gu, Y., Alexander, A., Ouellet, M., Tutnjević, S. and Santiago, J., (2025). Deus ex Machina: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Young Adults’ Religiosity, Temporal Values, and Time Spatialization Across Cultures. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. 18 (1), 19-31
Han, M. and Gu, Y., (2025). Does the name of a disease matter? Chinese people’s public perception of the renaming of COVID-19. Journal of Public Health. 47 (3), 629-636
Peeters, D., Schuurman, S., Zhai, T., Krahmer, E., Gu, Y. and Maes, A., (2025). Discourse genre predicts demonstrative use in text: Experimental evidence from Dutch and Mandarin. Cognition. 265, 1-7
Motamedi, Y., Murgiano, M., Grzyb, B., Gu, Y., Kewenig, V., Brieke, R., Donnellan, E., Marshall, C., Wonnacott, E., Perniss, P. and Vigliocco, G., (2024). Language development beyond the here‐and‐now: Iconicity and displacement in child‐directed communication. Child Development. 95 (5), 1539-1557
Fisher, JB., Rohlfing, KJ., Donnellan, E., Grimminger, A., Gu, Y. and Vigliocco, G., (2024). Explain with, rather than explain to. Interaction Studies. 25 (2), 244-255
Lin, H. and Gu, Y., (2022). “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.” A functional description of time expressions through fingers based on Chinese Sign Language naturalistic data. Language and Cognition. 14 (1), 61-84
Callizo-Romero, C., Tutnjević, S., Pandza, M., Ouellet, M., Kranjec, A., Ilić, S., Gu, Y., Göksun, T., Chahboun, S., Casasanto, D. and Santiago, J., (2022). Does time extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? A multitask crosscultural study. Language and Cognition. 14 (2), 275-302
Shi, J., Gu, Y. and Vigliocco, G., (2022). Prosodic modulations in child-directed language and their impact on word learning. Developmental Science. 26 (4), e13357-
Swerts, M., Gu, Y. and Boerrigter, T., (2022). Yes or No: How children combine gestures and speech to express honest and deceiving attitude. Stem-, Spraak- en Taalpathologie. 27, 206-222
Callizo-Romero, C., Tutnjević, S., Pandza, M., Ouellet, M., Kranjec, A., Ilić, S., Gu, Y., Göksun, T., Chahboun, S., Casasanto, D. and Santiago, J., (2020). Temporal focus and time spatialization across cultures. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 27 (6), 1247-1258
Gu, Y., Zheng, Y. and Swerts, M., (2019). Which Is in Front of Chinese People, Past or Future? The Effect of Language and Culture on Temporal Gestures and Spatial Conceptions of Time. Cognitive Science. 43 (12), e12804-
GU, YAN., ZHENG, Y. and SWERTS, M., (2019). Having a different pointing of view about the future: The effect of signs on co-speech gestures about time in Mandarin–CSL bimodal bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 22 (04), 836-847
Gu, Y., Mol, L., Hoetjes, M. and Swerts, M., (2017). Conceptual and lexical effects on gestures: the case of vertical spatial metaphors for time in Chinese. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. 32 (8), 1048-1063
Books (1)
Piata, A., Gordejuela, A. and Carrión, DA., (2022). Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity. John Benjamins Publishing Company. 9027257418. 9789027257413
Book chapters (1)
Gu, Y., (2022). Time in Chinese hands: Gesture and sign. In: Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity. Editors: Piata, A., Gordejuela, A. and Carrión, DA., . John Benjamins Publishing Company. 209- 232. 9027257418. 9789027257413
Conferences (17)
Zhang, Y. and Gu, Y., A recipient design in multimodal language on TV: A comparison of child-directed and adult- directed broadcasting
Gu, Y., Che-che (‘car-car’) and chi-chi (‘eat-eat’): Reduplication in Mandarin Chinese child-directed speech
Liu, Y., Geng, L., Gu, Y. and Han, M., (2025). Sentence-Final Particles in Mandarin Child-Directed Speech: Frequency and Impact on Speech Rate
Lin, H., Jiang, Y. and Gu, Y., (2024). Prosodic marking of information status in Chinese Sign Language
Han, M., Yang, L. and Gu, Y., (2024). Faster and smoother: Fluency in Chinese child-directed speech
Gao, J. and Gu, Y., (2024). Same Sentences Different Meanings: Prosodic and Gestural Resolution of Ambiguity in Mandarin Chinese
Han, M., Nie, Y. and Gu, Y., (2024). Sound effect, onomatopoeia, and iconic prosody in Chinese: Emerging vocal iconicity in child-directed speech and child production
Zhang, Y. and Gu, Y., (2024). Understanding individual differences in audiovisual child-directed language: The role of empathy and personality traits
Zhou, J. and Gu, Y., (2024). Unraveling Students’ Liking of Teachers: The Impact of Multimodal Cues during L2 English Vocabulary Teaching
Xi, Z., Gu, Y. and Vigliocco, G., (2022). Speaking Rate in 3-4-Year-Old Children: Its Correlation with Gesture Rate and Word Learning
Donnellan, E., Özder, LE., Man, H., Grzyb, B., Gu, Y. and Vigliocco, G., (2022). Timing relationships between representational gestures and speech: A corpus based investigation
Dong, S., Gu, Y. and Vigliocco, G., (2021). The impact of child-directed language on children’s lexical development
Shi, J., Gu, Y., Grzyb, B. and Vigliocco, G., (2020). Child-directed speech: the impact of variations in speaking rate on word learning
Gu, Y., Zheng, Y. and Swerts, M., (2017). Does Mandarin Spatial Metaphor for Time Influence Chinese Deaf Signers' Spatio-Temporal Reasoning?
Gu, Y., Zheng, Y. and Swerts, M., (2016). Which is in front of Chinese people: Past or Future? A study on Chinese people's space-time mapping
Gu, Y., Mol, L., Hoetjes, M. and Swerts, M., (2014). Does Language Shape the Production and Perception of Gestures? A Study on late Chinese-English Bilinguals' Conceptions about Time
Swerts, M., Boerrigter, T. and Gu, Y., (2014). Head gestures as congruent or incongruent signs of children's attitudes
Grants and funding
2025
Language acquisition in the early years: learning from and with caregivers
Economic and Social Research Council
Contact
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