Dr Kirsty R Green PhD, AFHEA

PhD in Psychology, University of Warwick, 2025
Associate Fellow of Advance HE, 2025
MA in Social Science Research, University of Warwick, 2022
MA in Applied Linguistics, University of Birmingham, 2021
PGCE in English, University of Canterbury (Teach First), 2011
BA in English Language and Literature, University of Leeds, 2009
Fellow of Advance HE, 2026

Kirsty is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham. Her research sits at the intersection of developmental psycholinguistics, language, communication and technology, with a particular focus on how the properties of communicative signals influence children’s learning, attention and social engagement. Her current research examines how children experience shared reading in increasingly digital contexts, including interactions with human partners, video-mediated partners and AI avatars.

Her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, Engaging Neurodiverse Children in Shared Reading in person and via Video and AI, investigates how different forms of communication and interaction influence young children’s engagement during shared reading. This work builds on her broader research programme examining iconicity—the resemblance between aspects of linguistic form and meaning—and its role in early language development and social interaction. Her research combines experimental and observational approaches with multimodal analysis of speech, gesture, gaze and interaction.

Kirsty completed a BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds, followed by an MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham and doctoral research in Psychology at the University of Warwick. Her PhD investigated the role of iconicity in speech and gesture during early child–caregiver interactions, bringing together perspectives from linguistics and developmental psychology. Her doctoral research resulted in a series of studies examining how iconic forms relate to children's engagement and language learning.

Alongside her research, Kirsty has extensive experience in higher education teaching. She previously worked as a Teaching Fellow in Psychology at Birmingham, teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, and as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Warwick. She has taught across areas including language and cognition, developmental psychology and research methods. She was awarded Fellowship of Advance HE in 2026.

Kirsty is also committed to interdisciplinary research community-building. She has organised international research events and seminar series bringing together researchers across linguistics, psychology and related disciplines. Her wider interests include child language development, iconicity in speech and gesture, multimodal communication, children's engagement with digital technologies, and the implications of AI-mediated interaction for child development and learning.

Language and Communication
Social and Differential Psychology
Research Review
Research Methods B
Research Methods in Mental Health

Her doctoral research investigated the role of iconicity—the resemblance between form and meaning—in early caregiver-child interactions, focusing on how iconic words and gestures support engagement and learning in infancy and early childhood. Across five studies, she combined experimental and corpus-based methods to examine how iconic forms function in naturalistic caregiver–child interactions and influence developmental trajectories.

The first two studies analysed how caregivers use iconic words (e.g., onomatopoeia) in infant-directed speech. In both a small-scale study of 18-month-olds and a larger cross-sectional sample of 13-, 18-, and 23-month-olds, iconic words were associated with greater infant engagement and more exaggerated infant-directed prosody. These findings suggest that iconicity serves multiple functions in caregiver-child interactions.

The third study used an experimental design to assess how iconicity affects word learning. Children aged 18 months and 3 years were taught novel onomatopoeic labels for animal toys that were either congruent or incongruent with the animals' sounds. While both groups learned congruent labels better, the effect reached statistical significance only in the older children. This suggests that sensitivity to form–meaning resemblance may strengthen with age or experience, offering new insight into how iconicity supports vocabulary acquisition across development.

The fourth study analysed a longitudinal corpus of naturalistic interactions to track the frequency and functions of onomatopoeia in caregiver and child speech across development. Onomatopoeia appeared more frequently in younger infants’ vocabularies and in caregivers’ speech to younger children. These words were often produced with playful prosody and typically used for enactment, rather than purely referential purposes—highlighting the multimodal, performative nature of early iconic communication.

The final study explored the emergence of iconic gestures. Analysing video recordings, she found that infants as young as 12 months produced spontaneous, representational gestures that resembled features of referents. These were often produced without direct adult modelling, suggesting an early capacity for embodied, iconic expression. This challenges the assumption that iconic gesture use requires linguistic proficiency or explicit instruction, and reinforces the importance of multimodal interaction in early symbolic development.

Together, these studies provide converging evidence that iconic forms—whether verbal or gestural—play a foundational role in early communication by making meanings more transparent and engaging. Her research contributes to key debates in developmental linguistics and cognitive science around the embodied, multimodal origins of symbolic systems. Importantly, it also lays the groundwork for applied research on how iconicity might support language development and engagement in neurodiverse populations.