Setback turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests?
Hello there! I’m Sho Akamine, a final-year PhD candidate at the MPI for Psycholinguistics. I was born and raised in Okinawa, Japan, and did a masters in linguistics at California State University, Fresno. Currently, I’m working with Prof. Asli Ozyurek, Prof. Antje Meyer, and Dr. Mark Dingemanse on multimodal alignment in co-present face-to-face and online video-mediated communication (e.g., Zoom).
2. Which part of your research so far are you most proud of?
I’m very proud that my PhD work encompasses various methods, including corpus, experimental, Bayesian statistics, causal inference, and kinematic analyses of co-speech gestures. I’m particularly proud of this because I attended all MEDAL summer schools and managed to apply what I learned (or taught) to my PhD work!
3. What challenges have you encountered in your research, and how did you overcome them?
One of the challenging moments during my PhD was when the results didn’t meet my expectations. In one of my chapters, I aimed to establish and validate a kinematic approach to quantifying the similarity of hand gesture forms by comparing the prediction of the kinematic measure with human ratings. Unfortunately, I found little to no correlation between them.
Initially, I felt disheartened, but this setback turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The unexpected results prompted me to think more deeply, which allowed me to find areas for improvement that ultimately led to a much higher correlation. This was a great lesson that challenges are actually opportunities for growth!
