Title: Ecological Language: a multimodal approach to the study of human language learning and processing Abstract: The human brain has evolved the ability to support communication in complex and dynamic environments. In such environments, language is learned, and mostly used in face-to-face contexts in which processing and learning are based on multiple cues both linguistic and non-linguistic (such as gestures, eye gaze, mouth patterns and prosody). Yet, our understanding of how language is learnt and processed - as well as applications of this knowledge - comes mostly from reductionist approaches in which the multimodal signal is reduced to speech or text. [...]