Situating multimodal language acquisition in the real-world: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek

Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek make a clear case for moving to a multimodal framework across spoken and signed languages, and they reveal some key insights for language acquisition that can be gained from such a framework. Bringing together current findings on both the development of speech-gesture integration and sign language also highlights a number of desiderata for moving the field forward. Here, I present some elements of a possible framework to capture multimodal language acquisition in spoken and signed languages, and I motivate the need for comparable evidence across sign and spoken languages that directly taps into learning in the real-world.