Gestural Signs Research Articles

Left or right, that is the question: use of egocentric frame of reference and the right-eye advantage for understanding gestural signs in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates).

How do bottlenose dolphins visually perceive the space around them? In particular, what cues do they use as a frame of reference for left-right perception? To address this question, we examined the dolphin's responses to various manipulations of the spatial relationship between the dolphin and the trainer by using gestural signs for actions given by the trainer, which have different meanings in the left and right hands. When the dolphins were tested with their backs to the trainer (Experiment 1) or in an inverted position underwater (Experiments 2 and 3), correct responses from the trainer's perspective were maintained for signs related to movement direction instructions. In contrast, reversed responses were frequently observed for signs that required different sounds for the left and right hands. When the movement direction instructions were presented with symmetrical graphic signs such as " × " and "●", accuracy decreased in the inverted posture (Experiment 3). Furthermore, when the signs for sounds were presented from either the left or right side of the dolphin's body, performance was better when the side of the sign movement coincided with the body side on which it was presented than when it was mismatched (Experiment 4). In the final experiment, when one eye was covered with an eyecup, the results showed that, as in the case of body-side presentation, performance was better when the open eye coincided with the side on which the sign movement was presented. These results indicate that dolphins used the egocentric frame for visuospatial cognition. In addition, they showed better performances when the gestural signs were presented to the right eye, suggesting the possibility of a left-hemispheric advantage in the dolphin's visuospatial cognition.

Sound-action symbolism in relation to precision manipulation and whole-hand grasp usage.

It has been suggested that actions can provide a fruitful conceptual context for sound symbolism phenomena, and that tight interaction between manual and articulatory processes might cause that hand actions, in particular, are sound-symbolically associated with specific speech sounds. Experiment 1 investigated whether novel words, built from speech sounds that have been previously linked to precision or power grasp responses, are implicitly associated with perceived actions that present precision manipulation or whole-hand grasp tool-use or the corresponding utilisation pantomimes. In the two-alternative forced-choice task, the participants were more likely to match novel words to tool-use actions and corresponding pantomimes that were sound-symbolically congruent with the words. Experiment 2 showed that the same or even larger sound-action symbolism effect can be observed when the pantomimes present unfamiliar utilisation actions. Based on this we propose that the sound-action symbolism might originate from the same sensorimotor mechanisms that process the meaning of iconic gestural signs. The study presents a novel sound-action phenomenon and supports the view that hand-mouth interaction might manifest itself by associating specific speech sounds with grasp-related utilisations.

Narrative abilities of Italian preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder

Oral narrative skills have been shown to be a valid measure of the linguistic competence of preschoolers and a significant predictor of their academic achievements. A deficiency in this area can lead to long-term sequelae in socio-emotional well-being in their adult life. This paper aims to provide a complete communicative picture of narrative discourse produced by monolingual preschoolers with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical peers matched by age, taking into account around fifty verbal and non-verbal features, computed on the spoken productions elicited by retelling tasks. The main finding is that although traditional standardized neuropsychological tests fail in capturing communicative deficits of DLD children, subtle but persistent language production difficulties are demonstrated by speech disruptions, reduced syntax complexity, and overt gestural signs of discomfort. This last finding is quite intriguing, considering that self- and hetero-adaptor gestures result from uneasiness and anxiety, usually escaping awareness. Taken together, the present results suggest that the observed deficits in DLD are not exclusively linguistic in nature, but may be associated with deficient planning abilities and monitoring processes difficulties.

How zoo-housed chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) target gestural communication within and between age groups

Gestural communication among nonhuman primates evolved as a response to their complex social environment. In this scope, males and females, adults and non-adults employ different gestures, probably due to their distinct social roles. In this study, a within and between age group analysis of the gestures produced in different contexts was carried out. For this purpose, a community of 16 captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) was observed during a 3-month period. Initially, data were collected through ad libitum sampling in order to identify their gestural repertoire. Subsequently, focal sampling was used to identify who gesticulated with whom and in what context. Overall, the results showed that juvenile chimpanzees tend to direct their gestures to different age groups according to the context; more specifically, juvenile chimpanzees frequently gesticulate within their age group in play contexts, and with older individuals in locomotion and affiliation contexts. Based on this, a certain degree of flexibility in juvenile chimpanzees gestural signalling is suggested, to the extent that they rather direct their gestural signs to chimpanzees of an apparently more adequate age group, with the aim of involving themselves in the activities’ context in which the gestural sign is produced.

The Order of Signs: Perspectives on the Relationship between Language and Thought during the First Century of Widespread Sign Language Teaching

While current debates oppose the cochlear implant's privileging of speech acquisition to teaching sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language for organizing thought itself. Should the order of gestural signs follow written syntax? Or should it have its own coherence, that is, possibly a different syntax and order of enunciation? Starting with these questions, distinct teaching legacies developed, specifying which kinds of signs to use in which context and what role signs were to fulfill. This article focuses on French deaf and hearing teachers whose positions were influential throughout Europe and the United States, moving from Abbé de l'Epée's 1784 method to Rémi Valade's 1854 publication of the first sign language grammar.

Exploring the Relationship between Interactional Competence and Group Oral Communication

From job interviews to working in a professional field, clear and effective interactional competence especially in face-to-face oral communication is vital for workplace interactions. As such, group oral communication is taught and assessed at academic institutions to enhance students’ turn-taking skills as an interactional competence. The approach is used to develop ESL students’ turn-taking skills particularly for low proficiency students. Therefore, this study aims to explore turn-taking skills of low proficiency ESL students in a mixed ability group discussion assessment. The group discussion interactions were audio visually recorded and analysed using Conversation Analysis. The transcriptions were analysed using the micro-analysis account focusing only on the turn-taking skills. Notably, self-selected, or indexical speaker selection by posing questions for another speaker to continue or using gaze or gestural signs was the prominent turn-taking skill used by the students to maintain intersubjectivity during group discussion. This somehow facilitated them in ensuring active involvement of all group members, and as an indicator for their interactional competence. This study concludes by discussing how turn-taking skills in group oral communication can benefit low proficiency language users’ interactional competence in learning the target language.

Young children spontaneously recreate core properties of language in a new modality

How the world's 6,000+ natural languages have arisen is mostly unknown. Yet, new sign languages have emerged recently among deaf people brought together in a community, offering insights into the dynamics of language evolution. However, documenting the emergence of these languages has mostly consisted of studying the end product; the process by which ad hoc signs are transformed into a structured communication system has not been directly observed. Here we show how young children create new communication systems that exhibit core features of natural languages in less than 30 min. In a controlled setting, we blocked the possibility of using spoken language. In order to communicate novel messages, including abstract concepts, dyads of children spontaneously created novel gestural signs. Over usage, these signs became increasingly arbitrary and conventionalized. When confronted with the need to communicate more complex meanings, children began to grammatically structure their gestures. Together with previous work, these results suggest that children have the basic skills necessary, not only to acquire a natural language, but also to spontaneously create a new one. The speed with which children create these structured systems has profound implications for theorizing about language evolution, a process which is generally thought to span across many generations, if not millennia.

Peirce’s universal categories: On their potential for gesture theory and multimodal analysis

AbstractThis paper presents an account of how Peirce’s Universal Categories (UCs) of perception and experience may, as heuristic principles, inform gesture theory and multimodal analysis. Peirce’s UCs – Firstness (possibility), Secondness (actuality), and Thirdness (law, habit) – constitute the core of his phenomenology and thus also the foundation of his triadic semiotics. I argue that compared to the basic sign-object relations icon, index, symbol mainly used in previous gesture research, the more fundamental UCs allow one to discern additional facets of how coverbal gestures act as signs. This notably pertains to the phenomenology, multidimensionality, and multifunctionality of gesture. The guiding assumption is that compared to Thirdness-laden linguistic symbols constituting written, spoken or signed discourses, gestures may exhibit the UCs to more strongly varying degrees and in different, modality-specific ways. The multimodal analyses discussed in the paper show how Firstness tends to draw attention to the articulatory qualities of gestural signs, including aesthetic and affective strata, Secondness to their experiential grounding and contextualized meaning, and Thirdness to embodied habits of perceiving, feeling, (inter-)acting, thinking, and communicating with others. I further suggest that particularly through interacting with embodied image schemata and force dynamics, such habits may give rise to flexible regularities and schematicity in gesture.

Mexican Sign Language Alphanumerical Gestures Recognition using 3D Haar-like Features

The Mexican Sign Language (LSM) is a language of the deaf Mexican community, which consists of a series of gestural signs articulated by hands and accompanied with facial expressions. The lack of automated systems to translate signs from LSM makes integration of hearing-impaired people to society more difficult. This work presents a new method for LSM alphanumerical signs recognition based on 3D Haar-like features extracted from depth images captured by the Microsoft Kinect sensor. Features are processed with a boosting algorithm. To evaluate performance of our method, we recognized a set of signs from letters and numbers, and compared the results with the use of traditional 2D Haar-like features. Our system is able to recognize static LSM signs with a higher accuracy rate than the one obtained with widely used 2D features.

Reading palm-up signs: Neurosemiotic overview of a common hand gesture

AbstractThis article explores ways in which the human nervous system encodes and decodes palm-up gestural signs, signals, and cues. Palm-up gestures and their accompanying speech acts evolved from an ancient neurological system that gave rise to both gestural (pectoral) communication and vocal (laryngeal) language (Bass and Chagnaud 2013, Shared developmental and evolutionary origins for neural basis of vocal–acoustic and pectoral–gestural signaling. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109. 10677–10684.). Meanings of palm-up cues are multifaceted and nuanced, and express degrees of emotional helplessness, cognitive uncertainty, prosodic emphasis, and social deference. By themselves or in combination with other hand movements – such as reaching, showing, and pointing – palm-up cues are used to begin speaking turns, ask questions, request favors, and share personal opinions, feelings, and moods. The palm-up hand movement is a possibly universal signal of deference, in Erving Goffman’s (1956, The nature of deference and demeanor. American Anthropologist 58(3). 473–502.) sense of the term, not unlike other deferential body-motion cues such as the anjai mudra, bow, curtsy, genuflection, kowtow, namaste, poussi-poussi, pranama, sampeah, and wai.

A Visual Asian American Diaspora: Belle Yang’s Hannah is My Name (2004) and Guene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006)

<p>The current study aims at theorizing the question of identity within the framework of postcolonial studies in two visual narratives: Belle Yang’s <em>Hannah is My Name</em> (2004) and Guene Luen Yang’s <em>American Born Chinese</em> (2006). Asian American studies have recently interrogated identity marking a shift from ethnic nationalism to recognition of multiplicity. The study also seeks to counter <em>Orientalist</em> stereotypes in American literature through the analysis and examination of postcolonial Asian American Diaspora to highlight a number of questions: 1) How is the identity of the Asian immigrant’s hybrid visually constructed? 2) How can Asian American visuals be addressed in non-white children’s literature? 3) What nurtures the transnational imaginations of the authors/illustrators in question? 4) What are the ramifications of transnational perspectives on Asian American narratives? 5) What are the nature of belonging and citizenship? The questions are a vehicle to investigate the cultural and ethnic politics of Chinese American literature and to explore new forms of self-identification in American literary discourse. They also yield rich insights into how to practice <em>multiculturalism</em>. What draws the visual narratives in question together is their postcolonial theme of reformulated identity to unsettle dichotomies within Asian American community. Furthermore, the present study explores semiotic systems in terms of image syntax, gestural, spatial and iconic signs to examine the relation between the <em>denotative</em> context of the narrative text and the <em>connotation</em> of the visual text that creates <em>polysemous</em> illustrations and indefinite meaning-making.</p>

Parallel Bimodal Bilingual Acquisition: A Hearing Child Mediated in a Deaf Family

The aim of this longitudinal case study was to describe bimodal and bilingual acquisition in a hearing child, Hugo, especially the role his Deaf family played in his linguistic education. Video observations of the family interactions were conducted from the time Hugo was 10 months of age until he was 40 months old. The family language was Swedish Sign Language (SSL). With Hugo, however, the parents used one language base in which single gestural signs or vocal words were often simultaneously inserted (the latter when not in visual contact). Hugo showed an awareness of visual attention to SSL communication at 22 months and differentiated vocal and gestural modality according to his interlocutor two months later. During the 28-month and 32-month sessions, a grammatical analysis might explain why Hugo’s use of SSL was rare. The findings are possibly vital for a broader international audience than professionals who meet bimodal-bilingual children.

Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture

Book Review| May 01 2012 Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture Noland, Carrie. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Pp. 264. James Petterson James Petterson Wellesley College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2012) 103 (3-4): 601–603. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-103.3-4.601 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation James Petterson; Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Romanic Review 1 May 2012; 103 (3-4): 601–603. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-103.3-4.601 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2012 The Trustees of Columbia University2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bottlenose Dolphins' (Tursiops truncatus) Theory of Mind as Demonstrated by Responses to their Trainers’ Attentional States

The present study examined the ability of dolphins to follow the gestural signs presented by humantrainers in various attentional states in order to understand the social cognition of dolphins. Thehuman trainers enacted the gestural signs by orienting their bodies and heads in different directions.If the dolphins were attending to the attentional state of the human trainers, their performances wouldbe affected by the orientation of the head only. Results showed, however, that the dolphins’ behaviorswere controlled by the orientation of the trainers’ bodies rather than that of their heads. Twoadditional tests further supported the minimal impact of head orientation on responses to humangestural signs. The present results might be influenced by the current experimental setting, thus weneed further efforts to accumulate empirical evidence on social cognition in dolphins.

À la recherche de la forme et du sens des gestes quasi-linguistiques et syllinguistiques dans la communication française, italienne et polonaise

The present paper is an attempt supplying proofs that gestural signs are almost like standard linguistic signs. It is claimed that language gestures exhibit numerous properties of classical linguistic signs conceived of as in the works of de Saussure. The dividing line between the two pertains, in essence, to the type of motivation between the signifier and the signified, found within gestural, but not linguistic signs. There is a conspicuous connection between the two aspects of the sign within various kinds of gestures, including volitional ones (most akin to speech acts or „la parole” of the Saussure) as well as within those which are not performed on purpose (called „sylinguistic” gestures).

À la recherche de la forme et du sens des gestes quasi-linguistiques et syllinguistiques dans la communication française, italienne et polonaise

The present paper is an attempt supplying proofs that gestural signs are almost like standard linguistic signs. It is claimed that language gestures exhibit numerous properties of classical linguistic signs conceived of as in the works of de Saussure. The dividing line between the two pertains, in essence, to the type of motivation between the signifier and the signified, found within gestural, but not linguistic signs. There is a conspicuous connection between the two aspects of the sign within various kinds of gestures, including volitional ones (most akin to speech acts or „la parole” of the Saussure) as well as within those which are not performed on purpose (called „sylinguistic” gestures).

Turn off the graphics: designing non-visual interfaces for mobile phone games

Mobile phones are a widespread platform for ICT applications because they are highly pervasive in contemporary society. Hence, we can think of mobile gaming as a serious candidate to being a prominent form of entertainment in the near future. However, most games (for computers, console and mobile devices) make extensive use of the visual medium, which tends to exclude visually-impaired users from the play. While mobile gaming could potentially reach many visually-impaired users, who are very familiar with this technology, currently there seems to be only very few alternatives for this community. In an attempt to explore new interactive possibilities for such users, this work presents an initial study on non-visual interfaces for mobile phone games. It is based on Semiotic Engineering principles, emphasizing communication through aural, tactile and gestural signs, and deliberately excluding visual information. Results include a number of issues that can be incorporated to a wider research agenda on mobile gaming accessibility, both for the visually-impaired and sighted.

Turn off the graphics: designing non-visual interfaces for mobile phone games

Abstract Mobile phones are a widespread platform for ICT applications because they are highly pervasive in contemporary society. Hence, we can think of mobile gaming as a serious candidate to being a prominent form of entertainment in the near future. However, most games (for computers, console and mobile devices) make extensive use of the visual medium, which tends to exclude visually-impaired users from the play. While mobile gaming could potentially reach many visually-impaired users, who are very familiar with this technology, currently there seems to be only very few alternatives for this community. In an attempt to explore new interactive possibilities for such users, this work presents an initial study on non-visual interfaces for mobile phone games. It is based on Semiotic Engineering principles, emphasizing communication through aural, tactile and gestural signs, and deliberately excluding visual information. Results include a number of issues that can be incorporated to a wider research agenda on mobile gaming accessibility, both for the visually-impaired and sighted.

Towards applied semiotics: An analysis of iconic gestural signs regarding physics teaching in the light of theatre semiotics

This study seeks to profit from theatre semiotics in order to investigate how semiosis can be implemented in the teaching of physics. It is based on the notion that in most human meaning-making situations, semiotic resources such as acoustic, spatial, and kinesic sign-systems evolve so as to complement and supplement one another. Traditionally, this particular view derives from theatre, where the signs conveyed from the theatrical performance effectively contribute to the construction of meaning; in terms of expression of dramatic signs, the actor is trained to compose modes in order to shape them on the stage. This article provides a classification of iconic gestural signs (i.e., movements of the entire body as opposed to gestures as mere movements of the hands), concerning physics teaching within a theatrical kinesic context. Through certain examples, corporeal functions and types are identified according to their cooperation with spatial semiotic resources, their temporal definition of actions, their proximity to the form of the referent, their relation to the content of the referent, and their collaboration with utterances. Furthermore, it is suggested that the practical implementation of theatre semiotics in physics education could help create a common, distinct and ‘tangible’ language among researchers, educators, and students.

The Political Uses of Sign Language: The Case of the French Revolution

The story of the Abb� de l�Ep�e�s �methodical signs� is best known as a key moment in Deaf history. However, at the time of the French Revolution this story served a larger political function. The example of de l�Ep�e�s deaf students, and their seemingly miraculous command of ideas learned through gestural signs, helped the French revolutionaries to imagine an ideal state of communication in the midst of a perceived crisis in language and politics. This essay both explains the political effects of this late eighteenth-century fascination with sign language and makes a case for the integration of Deaf history into the history of politics and social life more generally.