Bodily Coordination Research Articles

How a Child Learns to ‘Talk’ to a Smart Speaker: On the Emergence of Enlanguaged Practices

Abstract In this paper, I am concerned with the socio-material practice of engaging with voice-enabled machines. Far from ‘talking’ to a smart speaker, a user must master the skill of composing a command while routinely engaging with the machine. While the practice relies on practical understanding and intelligibility, attention must be paid to the trans-situational aspects that enable the situated enactment of socio-material practices. By conceptualizing engagement with the smart speaker as an enlanguaged practice, I trace the ability to engage in a seemingly individualistic practice to a person‘s history of engagement in and with the world. Specifically, I consider how a pre-literate child relies on instances of recursive bodily coordination with her caregiver to learn how to engage with a smart speaker. Informed by the languaging perspective which treats language as multiscalar bodily verbal activity, I trace enlanguaging to the intricate interplay of dialogicality, temporality, and embodiment.

Spontaneous bodily coordination varies across affective and intellectual child-adult interactions.

Research on child-adult interactions has identified that the morphology of bodily coordination seems to be sensitive to age and type of interaction. Mirror-like imitation emerges earlier in life and is more common during emotionally laden interactions, while anatomical imitation is acquired later and associated with cognitive tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these morphologies also vary with age and type of interaction during spontaneous coordination. Here we report a motion capture study comparing the spontaneous coordination patterns of thirty-five 3-year-old (20 girls; Mage = 3.15 years) and forty 6-year-old children (20 girls; Mage = 6.13 years) interacting with unacquainted adults during two storytelling sessions. The stories narrated the search of a character for her mother (Predominantly Affective Condition) or an object (Predominantly Intellectual Condition) inside a supermarket. Results show that children of both ages consistently coordinated their spontaneous movements towards adult storytellers, both in symmetric and asymmetric ways. However, symmetric coordination was more prominent in 3-year-old children and during predominantly emotional interactions, whereas asymmetric coordination prevailed in 6-year-old children and during predominantly intellectual interactions. These results add evidence from spontaneous interactions in favor of the hypothesis that symmetric coordination is associated with affective interactions and asymmetric coordination with intellectual ones.

Perceived Conversation Quality in Spontaneous Interactions

The quality of daily spontaneous conversations is of importance towards both our well-being as well as the development of interactive social agents. Prior research directly studying the quality of social conversations has operationalized it in narrow terms, associating greater quality to less small talk. Other works taking a broader perspective of interaction experience have indirectly studied quality through one of the several overlapping constructs such as rapport or engagement, in isolation. In this work we bridge this gap by proposing a holistic conceptualization of conversation quality, building upon the collaborative attributes of cooperative conversation floors. Taking a multilevel perspective of conversation, we develop and validate two instruments for perceived conversation quality (PCQ) at the individual and group levels. Specifically, we motivate capturing external raters' gestalt impressions of participant experiences from thin slices of behavior, and collect annotations of PCQ on the publicly available MatchNMingle dataset of in-the-wild mingling conversations. Finally, we present an analysis of behavioral features that are predictive of PCQ. We find that for the conversations in MatchNMingle, raters tend to associate smaller group sizes, equitable speaking turns with fewer interruptions, and time taken for synchronous bodily coordination with higher PCQ.

Exploring the Influence of Rhythmic Gymnastics on Athletes' Body Self-awareness: A Qualitative Study

This study aims to explore the influence of rhythmic gymnastics on the formation of athletes' body self-awareness. Using qualitative research methods, data were collected through in-depth interviews and observations, focusing on athletes who participated in rhythmic gymnastics training as case studies. The research found that rhythmic gymnastics training promotes athletes' cognition and perception of their own bodies, enhancing their level of body self-awareness. Through exercise and training, athletes gradually develop a positive body self-image and consciousness, increasing their confidence in and satisfaction with their own bodies. Furthermore, rhythmic gymnastics training also enhances athletes' posture control capabilities and bodily coordination, further strengthening their body self-awareness. However, some athletes face body image anxieties and self-evaluation issues during their training, which require attention and timely intervention. In conclusion, rhythmic gymnastics training has a positive impact on the formation of athletes' body self-awareness.

Corrective demonstrations and embodied resources for modeling speech sounds in aphasia speech-language therapy

This paper analyzes the way speech-language therapists instruct and correct aphasic speakers regarding the pronunciation of linguistic items and model pronunciation through auditory, verbal, visual, and tactile resources, thus configuring it as an embodied, multisensory experience. The data analysis shows that correction of a patient's productions is first initiated by therapists audibly, through repetition of the target item with specific prosodic features, such as loudness and length. When this type of cue proves to be ineffective, therapists perform instructions and corrective demonstrations through visual and haptic cues: By using their body as an “instructional tool,” they represent, with gestures and facial expressions, features of the target sound. They can also touch a patient's face to help them to correctly realize specific articulatory movements. This paper focuses on the hierarchy of embodied resources that are mobilized by therapists, in an ordered and incremental way, to model pronunciation. Moreover, it highlights the methods used to enhance patients' visual attention toward embodied resources and solve issues of bodily coordination. More broadly, this paper highlights the complex embodied nature of speaking and, by focusing on a pathological situation and a therapeutic setting, shows what participants treat as relevant for producing speech sounds in interaction.

Temporality, Language and Body in Collaborative Remembering: a Videographic Study.

Collaborative remembering involves bringing a story shared by a group of people back to the present. In this context, collaborative remembering has been studied following cues such as linguistic prompts that contribute to elicit memory in shared contexts. This study looks into collaborative remembering cues beyond their strictly linguistic character, which from a co-phenomenological standpoint comprises temporality, corporality and meaning making. A two-stage videographic analysis was required to undertake the study: (1) students partaking in meaningful interaction, and a (2) collaborative remembering instance, where two sets of three students met again, ten days after. Qualitative data analysis was undertaken, following Karl Bühler's organon model, simultaneously looking at bodily and temporal aspects, attending particularly to bodily motion coordination. Results show a pre-eminence of the appellative dimension alongside a prevalence of complementary over simultaneous patterns in collaborative remembering. A central aspect in this study is how collaborative remembering - including linguistic expressions- emerges as a coordinative phenomenon, where participants provide a joint account of remembered situations as a single being with a temporality of its own. These traits are discussed following a co-phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity.

Closer to far away: transcending the spatial in transnational families’ online video calling

ABSTRACT This paper studies how transnational children and their distantly located but emotionally close family members recreate their relationship using applications for online video calling. The focus is on the interaction of bodies and language, and if/how proximity of any kind is enabled. A critical posthumanist applied linguistics is embraced and communication is viewed as a bodily coordination ocurring in real time. This includes a material and dynamic view of language in constant transformation. Video captures are produced with three transnational, multilingual families in China and their adult relatives residing abroad (Europe). Moment analysis informs the processing of data. The analysis includes multipart semiotic assemblages of critical/creative moments and applies the Deleuzian concept of sense. The results suggest, the multi-local analogue/digital situation in online calling transcends conventionally imagined spatial ‘boundaries’. Furthermore, a bodily, multisensory proximity emerge as simultaneously critical to and created by this transcending spatiality. Multi-local communicative practices shed light on the multiple, material and semiotic components of the human senses, and how a rational understanding of proximity might be twisted. Proximity constantly emerges ‘in new copies' transcending the far away and close.

Linking embodied coordination dynamics and subjective experiences in musical interactions: a renewed methodological paradigm

Embodied music cognition provides a valuable and comprehensive research paradigm within systematic musicology to describe and explain musical sense-making. The basic claim underlying musical embodiment is that subjective meaning, in its broadest sense, is actively constructed within humans’ bodily interaction with music. As such, the empirical study of bodily coordination may provide insights into the subjective aspects of musical experiences. In the present paper, we advocate for a dynamical systems approach to human music interaction, focusing on the time-varying principles, and the relational aspects of the musical interaction process. We propose a model that integrates these focus points, to investigate the link between embodied coordination dynamics, subjective experience and sense-making. We then discuss possible quantitative and qualitative techniques that allow to operationalise the model into concrete empirical music research. Finally, we conclude by presenting some illustrative research cases conducted at IPEM, Ghent University institute for systematic musicology.

The educational value of the Sol Y Agua digital game into middle school science class

This paper focuses on finding the added educational value that the Sol y Agua game provides to science students in the El Paso TX context. Hong et al. (2009) created an evaluation index for assessing the educational value of digital games which includes seven categories: Mentality change, emotional fulfillment, knowledge enhancement, thinking skill development, interpersonal skills, spatial ability development, and bodily coordination. Sol y Agua is an educational digital game developed at the CyberShare Center of Excellence at the University of Texas at El Paso. The game is a role-playing adventure game that focuses on the environmental and water sustainability problems in the El Paso area. The game was created to be part of a lesson plan for middle school science classrooms. Along with practices that include computational thinking skills, the game provides students with opportunities to develop reasoning, simulation, and a better understanding of the soil and water properties as well as their usage within the community. Based on the Evaluation Indices for Assessing Educational Digital Games, a game provides elements that allow players (students) a mentality change, emotional fulfillment, knowledge enhancement, development of thinking skills, and spatial ability. The ultimate goal of the game is for students to design a park for a specific population, children and elder people. To achieve this, the game provides students with the opportunity to identify the different types of soil (desert, mountain) different types of trees, and their water and soil requirements.
 Keywords: digital games, assessment, science class, middle school

Dynamics of Simultaneous and Imitative Bodily Coordination in Trust and Distrust.

Body synchronization between interacting people involves coordinative movements in time, space and form. The introduction of newer technologies for automated video analysis and motion tracking has considerably improved the accurate measurement of coordination, particularly in temporal and spatial terms. However, the form of interpersonal coordination has been less explored. In the present study we address this gap by exploring the effect of trust on temporal and morphological patterns of interpersonal coordination. We adapted an optical motion-capture system to record spontaneous body movements in pairs of individuals engaged in natural conversations. We conducted two experiments in which we manipulated trust through a breach of expectancy (Study 1: 10 trustful and 10 distrustful participants) and friendship (Study 2: 20 dyads of friends and 20 dyads of strangers). In Study 1, results show the participants' strong, early mirror-like coordination in response to the confederates' breach of trust. In Study 2, imitative coordination tended to be more pronounced in pairs of friends than in pairs of non-friends. Overall, our results show not only that listeners move in reaction to speakers, but also that speakers react to listeners with a chain of dynamic coordination patterns affected by the immediate disposition of, and long-term relationship with, their interlocutors.

Correction: Evidence of embodied social competence during conversation in high functioning children with autism spectrum disorder.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0193906.].

Evidence of embodied social competence during conversation in high functioning children with autism spectrum disorder.

Even high functioning children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit impairments that affect their ability to carry out and maintain effective social interactions in multiple contexts. One aspect of subtle nonverbal communication that might play a role in this impairment is the whole-body motor coordination that naturally arises between people during conversation. The current study aimed to measure the time-dependent, coordinated whole-body movements between children with ASD and a clinician during a conversational exchange using tools of nonlinear dynamics. Given the influence that subtle interpersonal coordination has on social interaction feelings, we expected there to be important associations between the dynamic motor movement measures introduced in the current study and the measures used traditionally to categorize ASD impairment (ADOS-2, joint attention and theory of mind). The study found that children with ASD coordinated their bodily movements with a clinician, that these movements were complex and that the complexity of the children’s movements matched that of the clinician’s movements. Importantly, the degree of this bodily coordination was related to higher social cognitive ability. This suggests children with ASD are embodying some degree of social competence during conversations. This study demonstrates the importance of further investigating the subtle but important bodily movement coordination that occurs during social interaction in children with ASD.

How Interpersonal Coordination Can Reflect Psychological Counseling: An Exploratory Study

This study showed how interpersonal coordination between a psychotherapist and client changes during a psychological counseling session and how it reflects it. We aimed to evaluate psychological counseling sessions and understand psychotherapists’ embodied skills. Recently, it is considered that bodily coordination between a therapist and a client as well as psychotherapists’ embodied skills is important. We conducted an exploratory case study with quantitative analysis and a qualitative analysis. One female student and one female psychotherapist participated in our experiment. The student had a counseling session for 50 minutes in a session, which was video recorded. After quantifying both participants’ bodily activities by video image processing, the data were analyzed using nonlinear time series analysis in terms of the degree of coordination and the direction of influence. The data were also analyzed qualitatively by multiple researchers observing the video and by interviewing the psychotherapist. We identified the critical points of the session when the state of the client’s mind and the relationship between the therapist and client qualitatively changed. The results of qualitative and quantitative analyses were then compared. The results of the quantitative analysis showed that the degree of bodily coordination between the client and therapist was relatively high in three characteristic scenes: 1) building rapport, 2) clinical intervention, and 3) summarizing and closing the session. These results suggest that bodily coordination can highlight clinically important scenes. Moreover, the direction of influence also changed drastically in the clinical intervention scene. This case study suggests that interpersonal coordination between the client and therapist in a counseling session can partly reflect the quality of counseling (e.g. client-therapist relationship, clinical intervention).

Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components

The concept of stigmergy has been used to analyze self-organizing activities in an ever-widening range of domains, including social insects, robotics, web communities and human society. Yet, it is still poorly understood and as such its full power remains underappreciated. The present paper clarifies the issue by defining stigmergy as a mechanism of indirect coordination in which the trace left by an action in a medium stimulates subsequent actions. It then analyses the fundamental concepts used in the definition: action, agent, medium, trace and coordination. It clarifies how stigmergy enables complex, coordinated activity without any need for planning, control, communication, simultaneous presence, or even mutual awareness. The resulting self-organization is driven by a combination of positive and negative feedbacks, amplifying beneficial developments while suppressing errors. Thus, stigmergy is applicable to a very broad variety of cases, from chemical reactions to bodily coordination and Internet-supported collaboration in Wikipedia.

The illusion of common ground

Abstract When people talk about “common ground”, they invoke shared experiences, convictions, and emotions. In the language sciences, however, ‘common ground’ also has a technical sense. Many taking a representational view of language and cognition seek to explain that everyday feeling in terms of how isolated individuals “use” language to communicate. Autonomous cognitive agents are said to use words to communicate inner thoughts and experiences; in such a framework, ‘common ground’ describes a body of information that people allegedly share, hold common, and use to reason about how intentions have been made manifest. We object to this view, above all, because it leaves out mechanisms that demonstrably enable people to manage joint activities by doing things together. We present an alternative view of linguistic understanding on which appeal to inner representations is replaced by tracing language to synergetic coordination between biological agents who draw on wordings to act within cultural ecosystems. Crucially, human coordination depends on, not just bodies, but also salient patterns of articulatory movement (‘wordings’). These rich patterns function as non-local resources that, together with concerted bodily (and vocal) activity, serve to organize, regulate and coordinate both attention and the verbal and non-verbal activity that it gives rise to. Since wordings are normative, they can be used to develop skills for making cultural sense of environments and other peoples' doings. On our view, the technical notion of common ground is an illusion, because appeal to representations blinds theorists to bodily activity and the role of experience. Turning away from how wordings influence the circumstances, skills, and bodily coordination on which interpersonal understanding depends, it makes premature appeal to reasoning and internally represented knowledge. We conclude that outside its vague everyday sense, the concept of common ground is a notion that the language sciences would be well advised to abandon.

Bodily synchronization and ecological validity: a relevant concern for nonlinear dynamical systems theory.

Bodily synchronization and ecological validity: a relevant concern for nonlinear dynamical systems theory.

Keep meaning in conversational coordination.

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination.

Multimodal alignment during collaborative remembering

This article investigates the roles that interactive alignment of manual gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze play in small groups engaged in collaborative remembering. Qualitative analyses of a video corpus demonstrate that the coordination of these behaviors may contribute to joint remembering in various ways, depending upon the cognitive and communicative affordances of these behaviors. The observation that these behaviors are different in their nature and their contributory potential to shared remembering is corroborated by the results of a quantitative analysis, which suggests that co-speech gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze have different interactional dynamics. This supports the conclusion that in order to understand the role of multimodal alignment in the discourse of shared remembering, co-verbal behavior should not be treated as a homogeneous category. Finally, we discuss the potential of combined qualitative–quantitative approaches to inform the interplay of verbal and bodily coordination during interactive memory construction.

Dynamical methods for evaluating the time-dependent unfolding of social coordination in children with autism

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) suffer from numerous impairments in social interaction that affect both their mental and bodily coordination with others. We explored here whether interpersonal motor coordination may be an important key for understanding the profound social problems of children with ASD. We employed a set of experimental techniques to evaluate not only traditional cognitive measures of social competence but also the dynamical structure of social coordination by using dynamical measures of social motor coordination and analyzing the time series records of behavior. Preliminary findings suggest that children with ASD were equivalent to typically developing children on many social performance outcome measures. However, significant relationships were found between cognitive social measures (e.g., intentionality) and dynamical social motor measures. In addition, we found that more perceptually-based measures of social coordination were not associated with social motor coordination. These findings suggest that social coordination may not be a unitary construct and point to the promise of this multi-method and process-oriented approach to analyzing social coordination as an important pathway for understanding ASD-specific social deficits.

Math World: A Game-Based 3D Virtual Learning Environment (3D VLE) for Second Graders

This paper intends to introduce a game-based 3D Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to second graders. The impetus arose from the need to make learning in mathematics more effective and interesting through multimedia. Applied in a game, the basic mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are expected to performed by learners as they represent themselves as avatars while they immerse in a quest of digital objects in the VLE called Math World. Educational attributes such as mentality change, emotional fulfillment, knowledge enhancement, thinking skills development, and bodily coordination are evaluated to ensure learning effectiveness. Also, game playability measured in terms of game plays, story, mechanics and interface usability are examined for its educative design. With an aggregate of these enhanced indices, results attest that objectives were met while making mathematics an interesting, motivating and enjoyable subject, hence VLE a significant tool to complement the conventional approaches of teaching.