PLEASE NOTE: Our seminar room has a limited capacity. Please arrive early to ensure you
get a seat. The talk will begin promptly at 5.
The next talk in the CDC Seminar series will be given by:
Thomas C. Gunter (Max Planck Institute for Human, Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig)
Date: Wednesday, November 21, 2012, 5 PM
Location: Cognitive Development Center, Hattyú u. 14, 3rd floor
Title: Gesture-speech integration: Some examples of how gestures impact our verbal
communication
Abstract: In everyday face-to-face conversation, speakers not only use speech to transfer
information but also rely on facial expression, body posture and gestures. In this talk I
will take a closer look on how gestures potentially influence language processing on a
semantic (part 1) as well as on a syntactic (part 2) level. The first part of the talk
sketches some of the semantic influences of gestures and focus on how iconic gestures
affect speech comprehension. Iconic gestures have a close formal relationship to the
semantic content of speech. For instance, a speaker might perform a typing movement with
her fingers while saying: “Yesterday I wrote the letter”. Clearly, a listener can extract
additional information from these gestures (e.g. we know that the letter was written on a
keyboard and not with a pen). Although there is no doubt that iconic gestures are
communicative and can be integrated online with speech, little is known about the nature
of this process and how our own communicative abilities and also our environment influence
this integration process. In order to shed some light on these issues I will review
several ERP-experiments which looked at the influence of task, timing and environment on
gesture-speech integration. We will also discuss the issue whether gestures are
incorporated in a personal communication style and whether they will selectively impact
the perception of the communication of a specific individual. The second part of the talk
will explore the possibility that gesture influences the syntactic aspect of language and
will focus on beat-gestures. A beat gesture is a short, rhythmic movement or series of
movements of the hand. They have been suggested to accent or emphasize portions of the
co-expressive speech and may therefore influence which syntactic structure is assigned to
a sequence of words. Recently we have carried out several ERP-experiments that suggest
that indeed such gestures (and not other types of emphasis) can disambiguate ambiguous
syntactic structures. Taken all the experimental evidence together, I will suggest that
most effective communication not only involves the mouth, but also the hands.
Cognitive Science Events at CEU:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
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