Research – Lisette de Jonge-Hoekstra

As an Assistant professor in Developmental Psychology, my research focuses on children’s cognitive development. I take a multimodal approach, and investigate children’s hand movements, gestures and speech when they learn in different contexts, such Science & Technology tasks and classrooms. Inspired by complex dynamical systems theory and ecological psychology, I research how children’s hand movements and speech change over time, within a task. Importantly, I investigate how learning emerges from children’s interactions with their physical and social environment.

Methods that I use include video-recording of children’s task performance and coding their gestures and speech, movement tracking using either video-recordings or motion trackers, and audio-recording. Analyses focus on non-linear development, such as Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA), fractal analyses, and cross wavelet analysis.

Other projects that I’m involved in are related to gesture-speech coupling in general and to interpersonal coordination.

Publications

Submitted/Under review

De Jonge-Hoekstra, L. & Cox, R.F.A. (2026). Embodied and Embedded Cognitive Development.

De Jonge-Hoekstra, L., Kupers, E., Bakker, A., De Boer, A., Minnaert, A., & Vermunt, J. D. (2024). Stalled in the process to a transition: Implementation of differentiation in the school from the perspective of teachers. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bwhtu

Published

De Jonge-Hoekstra, L. (2025). Cognitive understanding is a functional coordination pattern, just like swimming. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1573946. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1573946

De Jonge-Hoekstra, L. , Cox, R.F.A., Van der Steen, S., & Dixon, J.A. (2021). Easier said than done? Task difficulty’s influence on temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching between gestures and speech. Cognitive Science, 45(12989). https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12989.

Pouw, W., De Jonge-Hoekstra, L., Harrison, S. J., Paxton, A., & Dixon, J. A. (2020). Gesture-speech physics in fluent speech and rhythmic upper limb movements. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14532

De Jonge-Hoekstra, L., Van Der Steen, S., & Cox, R. F. A. (2020). Movers and shakers of cognition: Hand movements, speech, task properties, and variability. Acta Psychologica, 211, 103187. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2020.103187

De Jonge-Hoekstra, L. , Van der Steen, S., Van Geert, P., & Cox, R. F. A. (2016). Asymmetric Dynamic Attunement of Speech and Gestures in the Construction of Children’s Understanding. Frontiers in Psychology , 7 , 1–19. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00473

Cox, R. F.A., Van der Steen, S., Guevara, M., De Jonge-Hoekstra, L., & van Dijk, M. (2016). Chromatic and Anisotropic Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Interpersonal Behavior. In Recurrence Plots and Their Quantifications: Expanding Horizons (pp. 209-225). Springer International Publishing.

Publications

Submitted/Under review

Published

Posters