Search results for " Gestures"

Supramodal neural processing of abstract information conveyed by speech and gesture

2013

Abstractness and modality of interpersonal communication have a considerable impact on comprehension. They are relevant for determining thoughts and constituting internal models of the environment. Whereas concrete object-related information can be represented in mind irrespective of language, abstract concepts require a representation in speech. Consequently, modality-independent processing of abstract information can be expected. Here we investigated the neural correlates of abstractness (abstract vs. concrete) and modality (speech vs. gestures), to identify an abstractness-specific supramodal neural network. During fMRI data acquisition 20 participants were presented with videos of an ac…

Is displacement possible without language? Evidence from preverbal infants and chimpanzees

2013

Is displacement possible without language? This question was addressed in a recent work by Liszkowski and colleagues (Liszkowski, Schafer, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). The authors carried out an experiment to demonstrate that 12-month-old prelinguistic infants can communicate about absent entities by using pointing gestures, while chimpanzees cannot. The main hypothesis of their study is that displacement does not depend on language but is, however, exclusively human and instead depends on species-specific social-cognitive human skills. Against this hypothesis, we will argue that a symbolic representation is needed to intentionally communicate absence and that this symbolic representa…

Performative Habitats and the aesthetics of ordinary gestures

2022

Il saggio analizza il progetto artistico di Egle Oddo, Performative Habitats, alla luce dell’estetica dei gesti ordinari. Con Performative Habitats biologia, botanica e scienze naturali incontrano i molteplici linguaggi delle discipline artistiche. In un momento storico in cui il cambiamento climatico è tra le emergenze primarie, l’artista si prefigge l’obiettivo di riconvertire le pratiche quotidiane e stabilire nuove modalità di produzione artistica che siano sostenibili per l’ambiente. The essay explores Egle Oddo's artistic project, Performative Habitats, in light of the aesthetics of ordinary gestures. With Performative Habitats biology, botany and natural sciences meet the multiple la…

2019

The development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of the structural combinatoriality of a language, has been widely investigated in relation to reading (dis)ability across languages. However, the extent to which knowledge of phonemic units may interact with spoken language organization in (transparent) alphabetical languages has hardly been investigated. The present study examined whether phonemic awareness correlates with coarticulation degree, commonly used as a metric for estimating the size of children's production units. A speech production task was designed to test for developmental differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree in 41 German children from 4 to 7 years of a…

Perception and replication of planar sonic gestures

2012

As tables, boards, and walls become surfaces where interaction can be supported by auditory displays, it becomes important to know how accurately and effectively a spatial gesture can be rendered by means of an array of loudspeakers embedded in the surface. Two experiments were designed and performed to assess: (i) how sequences of sound pulses are perceived as gestures when the pulses are distributed in space and time along a line; (ii) how the timing of pulses affects the perceived and reproduced continuity of sequences; and (iii) how effectively a second parallel row of speakers can extend sonic gestures to a two-dimensional space. Results show that azimuthal trajectories can be effectiv…

Signals of intensification and attenuation in orchestra and choir conduction

2017

Based on a model of communication according to which not only words but also body signals constitute lexicons (Poggi, 2007), the study presented aimes at building a lexicon of conductors’ multimodal behaviours requesting intensification and attenuation of sound intensity. In a corpus of concerts and rehearsals, the conductors’ body signals requesting to play or sing forte, piano, crescendo, diminuendo were analysed through an annotation scheme describing the body signals, their meanings, and their semiotic devices: generic codified (the same as in everyday language); specific codified (shared with laypeople but with specific meanings in conduction); direct iconic, (resemblance between visua…

Komunikatīvie žesti agrīnajā valodas apguvē

2018

Samērā nesen zinātnieki sāka pievērst uzmanību agrīnājai valodas apguvei, jo pirms tam nepastāvēja būtiskas atšķirības starp valodu macīšanās procesu un valodu apguvi. Mūsdienās ir veikti pētījumi saistībā ar pirmās valodas apguvi (Lust un Foley, 2008; Clark, 2009), tāpat arī veikti pētījumi otras valodas apguvē (Saville-Troike, 2006), bilingvālās valodas apguves pētījumi (Houwer, 2009), kā arī mazbērnu valodas pētījumi (Crystal, 2005). Šajā maǧistra darbā tika ietverti bērnu žestu pētījumi (Iverson et al., 1999; Blake, 2007; Cochet and Vauclair, 2012; Hoff, 2014). Blake (2007) un Hoff (2014) pētījumi balstīti uz komunikatīviem žestiem, bet (Iverson et al.(1999) un Cochet un Vauclair (2012)…

“Mouth Actions as Gestures in Sign Language” pp 104-123

2008

The present study investigates the nature of mouth actions in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and shows how the manual and the oral modality can be integrated when the visual-gestural channel is chosen for communication. Finally, the role played by mouth actions in sign language will be investigated and paralleled to co-speech gestures by re-working Kendon’s continuum in order to show how orality could become gestural when co-occurring with signing.

Time Unification on Local Binary Patterns Three Orthogonal Planes for Facial Expression Recognition

2019

International audience; Machine learning has known a tremendous growth within the last years, and lately, thanks to that, some computer vision algorithms started to access what is difficult or even impossible to perceive by the human eye. While deep learning based computer vision algorithms have made themselves more and more present in the recent years, more classical feature extraction methods, such as the ones based on Local Binary Patterns (LBP), still present a non negligible interest, especially when dealing with small datasets. Furthermore, this operator has proven to be quite useful for facial emotions and human gestures recognition in general. Micro-Expression (ME) classification is…

How Hand Gestures Contribute to Action Ascription

2019

This article investigates the embodied achievement of intersubjectivity by analyzing depictive gestures that are produced during the final components of the ongoing verbal TCU and extended into the following turn transition space. The depictive gestures in focus elaborate the TCUs by providing additional information on the verbal content of the turn. They may, for example, provide a visual representation of an action that is referred to in the verbal TCU, depict details that are not referred to in talk, or perform bodily enactments that model projected next actions. The analysis demonstrates that timed in this way, the gestures contribute to the multimodal action package that they are part …