Spencer D. Kelly, Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences, and Yukari Hirata, Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures have received an award of $26,000 for their project 鈥淎ccentuating the Positive: Can Co-Speech Hand Gestures Help Judgments of Accent in a Foreign Language?鈥. The project will investigate whether speakers of a foreign language can use culturally appropriate hand gestures to help make their accents easier to understand to native speakers. This work will also explore whether hand gestures can reduce some of the negative stigma associated with non-native accents during cross-cultural communication.