My research targets adult second language (L2) and bilingual acquisition and processing, and also gesture production and comprehension in acquisition, drawing on multiple methods ranging from speech and gesture analysis to behavioural and neurocognitive techniques. I was a Wallenberg Scholar with a project entitled Embodied billingualism. I lead the group Language Acquisition, Multilingualism, and Teaching (LAMINATE) w. J. Granfeldt, and the RJ proogramme TEAM. I am Immediate Past President of the International Society for Gesture Studies.

Previously, I headed the research group The Dynamics of Multilingual Processing (with P. Indefrey) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands, where I also co-founded the Nijmegen Gesture Centre (with A. Özyurek), the first centre of its kind.