Body, Language, and Socialisation Across Cultures

As every parent knows, infants and toddlers begin learning to communicate with bodily actions long before they learn to converse in words. And when they do learn to speak or sign, it is in combination with those other modalities, and remains so throughout their lives. The Body, Language, and Socialisation across Cultures (BLS) project aims to enhance our understanding of the multimodal ways in which people learn languages, and in the process become socialised into particular cultures and communities. It brings together an international team of leading experts in the field to investigate the interplay of speech and sign with other bodily forms of communication in a wide variety of cultures.


The aims of the project are to advance the understanding of:

  • the language socialisation process across diverse cultures and languages, including sign languages;
  • the intersection of communicative modalities that regularly occur in that process;
  • how that process shapes people’s ways of interacting with each other and experiencing the natural and social world.

The BLS project is supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council.