Representational Gestures Research Articles

In hand and in mind: Effects of gesture production and viewing on second language word learning

ABSTRACTTo date, within the context of second language (L2) word learning, nonspontaneous representational gesture viewing's impact on memory and spontaneous gesture production's impact on communication have been examined separately. Thus, it is unclear whether and how these effects interact, particularly in the same individuals. The present study addresses this question by comparing these effects and by examining their influence on one another. To do so, a dialogic task was employed in which participants learned words from a novel L2 and taught them to other similar participants. The results show that viewing nonspontaneous representational gesture did not affect L2 word recall whereas spontaneous production of different gesture types affected communication and memory of L2 word meanings in varying ways. Furthermore, the results provide evidence that gesture viewing primes production of similar types of gestures, and that the quantity and types of gestures produced differ based on the context of communication. These results indicate that the effects of spontaneous gesture production on communication are stronger than the effects of nonspontaneous gesture viewing on memory, and that these effects influence one another. Together, these results demonstrate that spontaneous gesture production and nonspontaneous gesture viewing play distinct but interrelated roles in L2 acquisition.

Development and validation of the comprehensive praxis assessment for children aged 6–8

This study examined the psychometric properties of motor praxis using a large school-based sample of children (n=239). We developed and evaluated the construct validity of a motor praxis assessment using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A model with four latent variables was evaluated for goodness of fit. CFA established that the scale was multifactorial and supported the four-factor model (motor imagery, verbal gesture production, imitative gesture production and knowledge of object-use). The internal consistency, inter-rater reliability and concurrent validity of the praxis assessment mostly demonstrated good to excellent results for the full scale and the subscales. The motor praxis demonstrated an ontogenic progression in 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds, suggesting a developmental trend during these ages, but with the exception of gestural representation on imitation. Implications for motor development and clinical evaluation are discussed herein in relation to the four instruments.

Blood on Boylston: Digital Memory and the Dramatisation of Recent History in <em>Patriots Day</em>

Blood on Boylston: Digital Memory and the Dramatisation of Recent History in <em>Patriots Day</em>

Deaf and hearing children’s picture naming

Abstract Stefanini, Bello, Caselli, Iverson, & Volterra (2009) reported that Italian 24–36 month old children use a high proportion of representational gestures to accompany their spoken responses when labelling pictures. The two studies reported here used the same naming task with (1) typically developing 24–46-month-old hearing children acquiring English and (2) 24–63-month-old deaf children of deaf and hearing parents acquiring British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English. In Study 1 children scored within the range of correct spoken responses previously reported, but produced very few representational gestures. However, when they did gesture, they expressed the same action meanings as reported in previous research. The action bias was also observed in deaf children of hearing parents in Study 2, who labelled pictures with signs, spoken words and gestures. The deaf group with deaf parents used BSL almost exclusively with few additional gestures. The function of representational gestures in spoken and signed vocabulary development is considered in relation to differences between native and non-native sign language acquisition.

Early maternal mirroring predicts infant motor system activation during facial expression observation

Processing facial expressions is an essential component of social interaction, especially for preverbal infants. In human adults and monkeys, this process involves the motor system, with a neural matching mechanism believed to couple self- and other-generated facial gestures. Here, we used electroencephalography to demonstrate recruitment of the human motor system during observation and execution of facial expressions in nine-month-old infants, implicating this system in facial expression processing from a very young age. Notably, examination of early video-recorded mother-infant interactions supported the common, but as yet untested, hypothesis that maternal mirroring of infant facial gestures is central to the development of a neural matching mechanism for these gestures. Specifically, the extent to which mothers mirrored infant facial expressions at two months postpartum predicted infant motor system activity during observation of the same expressions at nine months. This suggests that maternal mirroring strengthens mappings between visual and motor representations of facial gestures, which increases infant neural sensitivity to particularly relevant cues in the early social environment.

Representations of hands in the Florentine Codex by Bernardino de Sahagún (ca 1499–1590)

One of the most outstanding gatherers of information about the culture of the pre-Colombian Mexica of Nahua, also known as the Aztecs, was the Franciscan monk Bernardino de Sahagún, who compiled his findings in 12 books with the title General History of the Things of New Spain between 1540 and 1585. The so-called Codex is a complex document which offers a variety of information about Mexica culture in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin, containing also pictographical images and ornaments. This study offers iconographic interpretations of the Codex’s illustrations and especially focuses on the representations of hands and gestures, preferentially in contexts related to birth, upbringing, and education. A thorough analysis of the diverse text bodies reveals certain patterns of the transculturation process which took place in Spanish-colonised America in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, the interpretation of the material contributes to the ongoing discussion about Sahagún’s role in this process, highlighting that his use of early ethnographic-like methods was motivated by the objective to create a tool which made the conversion of the indigenous population to Catholicism, their submission and exploitation by the Spanish conquerors easier and arguing that his classification as an early ethnographer by some researchers is not correct.

Teacher spatial skills are linked to differences in geometry instruction.

Spatial skills have been linked to better performance in mathematics. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between teacher spatial skills and their instruction, including teacher content and pedagogical knowledge, use of pictorial representations, and use of gestures during geometry instruction. Fifty-six middle school teachers participated in the study. The teachers were administered spatial measures of mental rotations and spatial visualization. Next, a single geometry class was videotaped. Correlational analyses revealed that spatial skills significantly correlate with teacher's use of representational gestures and content and pedagogical knowledge during instruction of geometry. Spatial skills did not independently correlate with the use of pointing gestures or the use of pictorial representations. However, an interaction term between spatial skills and content and pedagogical knowledge did correlate significantly with the use of pictorial representations. Teacher experience as measured by the number of years of teaching and highest degree did not appear to affect the relationships among the variables with the exception of the relationship between spatial skills and teacher content and pedagogical knowledge. Teachers with better spatial skills are also likely to use representational gestures and to show better content and pedagogical knowledge during instruction. Spatial skills predict pictorial representation use only as a function of content and pedagogical knowledge.

Is the Concept of Obligation Moralized?

Conceptual jurisprudence is concerned to explicate the concept of law and other concepts central to core legal practices, as we understand them. The centrality of obligation-talk to legal practice is obvious, as the very point of litigation is to resolve disputes regarding the obligations of the various parties. As H.L.A. Hart puts it, “where there is law, there human conduct is made in some sense non-optional or obligatory.” Accordingly, no conceptual theory of law can be wholly successful without an adequate account of the nature of legal obligation that also explains whether and how law creates legal obligation.Neither Hart nor Austin has a successful account of legal obligation. Hart rejects John Austin’s command theory of obligation on the ground that coercive commands can oblige, but never obligate, compliance; a sovereign threat of a sanction is as purely coercive as a gunman’s orders. But Hart's view is vulnerable to the same problem: a conceptually possible system in which citizens do not accept law or view law as providing any reasons for action seems as coercive with respect to citizens as a gunman’s orders are with respect to victims. In this essay, I argue that the problems afflicting Hart’s theory of obligation gesture in the direction of thinking that the general concept of obligation – of which social, legal, and moral obligation are subtypes – includes a conceptual moral constraint. Just as only a very good person can count as a “saint,” only a system of norms that satisfies certain moral norms can count as giving rise to “obligations.” Accordingly, I argue, as a conceptual matter, that only those institutional systems of social norms that satisfy some threshold level of moral respectability have the capacity to create obligations.

Laban movement analysis and hidden Markov models for dynamic 3D gesture recognition

In this paper, we propose a new approach for body gesture recognition. The body motion features considered quantify a set of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) concepts. These features are used to build a dictionary of reference poses, obtained with the help of a k-medians clustering technique. Then, a soft assignment method is applied to the gesture sequences to obtain a gesture representation. The assignment results are used as input in a Hidden Markov Models (HMM) scheme for dynamic, real-time gesture recognition purposes. The proposed approach achieves high recognition rates (more than 92% for certain categories of gestures), when tested and evaluated on a corpus including 11 different actions. The high recognition rates obtained on two other datasets (Microsoft Gesture dataset and UTKinect-Human Detection dataset) show the relevance of our method.

CONSIDERAÇÕES SOBRE O CORPO MUSICAL

Neste artigo teço reflexões sobre o corpo musical, partindo das teorias do Gesto Musical. Para compreender o que seria um corpo musical, abordo conceitos das ciências cognitivas e do estudo do movimento, com o objetivo de problematizar as visões de corpo na música. A metáfora do corpo como instrumento é posta em discussão, a partir do momento que os estudos em Gesto Musical reivindicam diferentes formas de vivenciar/olhar para o corpo na experiência musical/sonora. Elementos como a Estética da Sonoridade e as intersecções entre música e teatro complementam uma discussão, acerca da intersecção entre as artes na performance cênica.

Erratum to: Gestural Representation of Emotions: A Comparative Study on Chilean and American Women

Erratum to: Gestural Representation of Emotions: A Comparative Study on Chilean and American Women

Locating Theatricality on Stage and Screen: Rescuing Performance Practice and the Phenomenon of Fifteen Strings of Cash ( Shiwu Guan ; 1956)

Theatricality, or an aesthetics of exaggeration, is the highlight and defining characteristic of the stage in xiqu (indigenous Chinese drama). When Maoist art fell under the general aegis of socialist realism, however, xiqu leaders undertook significant changes to performance practice, including the general execution of traditional gesture. These changes initiated a conversation about the value of theatricality that spanned across the theater industry, and fundamentally challenged the hegemony of the realist aesthetic regime. Amidst the crescendoing discussion on theatricality, the hit Kunqu play Fifteen Strings of Cash (Shiwu guan; 1956) helped revive interest in the rich tradition of aestheticized movement. At the time of its move to the silver screen, the film world was debating how to respond to the aesthetic consequences of the clash between an actor-centered, theatrical art and an immersive, realist one. Fifteen Strings of Cash interfaced the concerns of the cinematic world with the continuously changing discourse on theatricality. In this article, I use this government-sanctioned, popular culture hit to look at the dynamic history of official discourse on theatrical gesture. I explore the influences on the revival of theatricality, whether from rival portions of theater officialdom, or the force of entertainment culture across media, and how these factors mixed with nationalism.

Ethics, Staged

This article stages a dialogue between Giorgio Agamben�s theory of gesture and the 2016 reconstruction of Merce Cunningham�s 1964 choreography, Winterbranch. This juxtaposition encourages a comparison between Agamben's and Cunningham's respective approaches to the semiotics of dance, the way that dance can generate meaning but also evade meaning in a way that Agamben deems "proper" to the "ethical sphere." For Agamben, dance is composed of what he calls "gestures" that have "nothing to express" other than expressivity itself as a "power" unique to humans who have language. For Cunningham, dance is composed of what he calls "actions," or at other times "facts"�discrete and repeatable movements sketched in the air that reveal the "passion," the raw or naked "energy" of human expressivity before that energy has been directed toward a specific expressive project. I will look more closely at what Cunningham means by "actions," and to what extent they can be considered "gestures" in Agamben's terms; I will also explore the "ethical sphere" opened by the display of mediality, the "being-in-a-medium" of human beings. What, then, do dance gestures expose that ordinary gestures do not? Why would such an exposure be �ethical� in Agamben�s terms? And why would (his notion of) the ethical rely on a stage?

Colonizing Gestures: Crusoe, the Signing Sovereign

This article offers a reading of the colonialist and ableist (audist) assumptions that undergird Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). I argue that Crusoe’s fraught experience of sound on the island serves as punishment for sins he committed in his youth (indicating the novel’s audism) and that his use of gesture allows him both to manage his auditory uncertainty and to consolidate power over Friday. Through my analysis of John Bulwer’s universal theory of gesture, I situate that cultural history alongside the emergence of deaf education in the eighteenth century. Reading gesture as critical to the colonial philosophy of Robinson Crusoe provides insight into travel narratives by Christopher Columbus and William Dampier, who convey that sign was used in the absence of interpreters in con tact zones. Such representations of gesture make legible colonial designs and Indigenous resistance. Gesture destabilizes Crusoe’s authority even while it enables him to establish his rule. My reading of Robinson Crusoe argues that colonialism and audism work together to justify Western European expansion.

Touch-less: Wearable music and the score-theatre

Abstract This article reflects on the idea of the music score as a wearable theatrical prop, an idea able both to envisage theatrical gestures as the outgrowth of music notation and epitomize the intangibility of music by means of ‘ostented’ dramaturgical objects. Through an exploration of Touch-less: Wearable Graphic Scores for One Acting Singer, a self-composed work, this article discusses the compositional and aesthetic processes that emerge from the combination of a graphically notated score and the idea of wearable-score-prop within the framework of new music theatre, a combination that eventually leads toward an appreciation of the score-theatre. The discussion takes into consideration relevant examples and concepts put forward by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel and Sylvano Bussotti. Similarly, it proposes connections between the idea of score-prop and the aesthetic properties of the calligram.

Gestural Representation of Emotions: A Comparative Study on Chilean and American Women

Emotions and their expression are adaptive processes, relevant to maintaining personal welfare and to structuring social relations through the verbal and nonverbal communication of feelings and needs to others. Emotional representation refers to the ability to intentionally and deliberately produce facial and bodily movements to convey an emotion. Although this representation possesses universal aspects, its richness lies in its cultural variability. This study seeks to describe and compare the intensity of the facial and bodily representation of six emotions in 120 Chilean and American women from different socioeconomic groups. The study adopts an investigatory, descriptive, cross-sectional and comparative design. A socio-demographic questionnaire and an assessment of emotional gestures in adults were applied. For the assessment, the women’s responses to six short stories related to the emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, pride and shame were filmed and coded by independent coders from both countries. The results indicate that Chilean women are more intense when representing happiness and pride with their faces, whereas American women are more intense when representing happiness and anger with their bodies. In addition, differences emerge based on socioeconomic status. In both countries, a higher socioeconomic status is associated with greater intensity in the representation of emotions. The results and their implications are discussed.

A 3D stroke based representation of sign language signs using key maximum curvature points and 3D chain codes

Sign Language is a visual spatial language used by deaf and dumb community to convey their thoughts and ideas with the help of hand gestures and facial expressions. This paper proposes a novel 3D stroke based representation of dynamic gestures of Sign Language Signs incorporating local as well as global motion information. The dynamic gesture trajectories are segmented into strokes or sub-units based on Key Maximum Curvature Points (KMCPs) of the trajectory. This new representation has helped us in uniquely representing the signs with fewer number of key frames. We extract 3D global features from global trajectories using a scheme of representing strokes as 3D codes, which involves dividing strokes into smaller units (stroke subsegment vectors or SSVs), and representing them as belonging to one of the 22 partitions. These partitions are obtained using a discretisation procedure which we call an equivolumetric partition (EVP) of sphere. The codes representing the strokes are referred to as an EVP code. In addition to global hand motion and local hand motion, facial expressions are also considered for non-manual signs to interpret the meaning of words completely. In contrast to existing methods, our method of stroke based representation has less expensive training phase since it only requires the training of key stroke features and stroke sequences of each word.

How do gestures influence thinking and speaking? The gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis.

People spontaneously produce gestures during speaking and thinking. The authors focus here on gestures that depict or indicate information related to the contents of concurrent speech or thought (i.e., representational gestures). Previous research indicates that such gestures have not only communicative functions, but also self-oriented cognitive functions. In this article, the authors propose a new theoretical framework, the gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis, which explains the self-oriented functions of representational gestures. According to this framework, representational gestures affect cognitive processes in 4 main ways: gestures activate, manipulate, package, and explore spatio-motoric information for speaking and thinking. These four functions are shaped by gesture's ability to schematize information, that is, to focus on a small subset of available information that is potentially relevant to the task at hand. The framework is based on the assumption that gestures are generated from the same system that generates practical actions, such as object manipulation; however, gestures are distinct from practical actions in that they represent information. The framework provides a novel, parsimonious, and comprehensive account of the self-oriented functions of gestures. The authors discuss how the framework accounts for gestures that depict abstract or metaphoric content, and they consider implications for the relations between self-oriented and communicative functions of gestures. (PsycINFO Database Record

Expression of motion events in Farsi

ABSTRACTThe current study examines how gestural representations of motion events arise from linguistic expressions in Farsi, as this language offers many unique characteristics; exhibiting characteristics of both Talmy’s satellite- and verb-framed languages. We examined native Farsi speakers’ speech and gestures in describing 20 motion events. We focused on two motion event components: path (trajectory of motion like up) and manner (how the action is performed like jumping). Analyses of syntactic packaging and clause-level correspondence between speech and gesture, as well as parallel ordering of speech and gesture sequences were, for the most part, in support of models that posit a close correspondence between speech-gesture production. However, while Farsi speakers described both path and manner in their speech, gesture was markedly impoverished for manner, suggesting constraints on the one-to-one mapping between linguistic and gestural expressions.

La Mélancholie Des Dragons by Phillipe Quesne, and: Gardens Speak by Tania El Khoury, and: Top Secret International (State 1) by Rimini Protokoll

Reviewed by: La Mélancholie Des Dragonsby Phillipe Quesne, and: Gardens Speakby Tania El Khoury, and: Top Secret International (State 1)by Rimini Protokoll Matthew Robert Moore LA MÉLANCHOLIE DES DRAGONS. By Phillipe Quesne. Under the Radar Festival, The Kitchen, New York City. 01 11, 2016. GARDENS SPEAK. By Tania El Khoury. Under the Radar Festival, NYU Tisch Abe Burrows Theatre, New York City. 01 6, 2016. TOP SECRET INTERNATIONAL (STATE 1). By Rimini Protokoll. Under the Radar Festival, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York. 01 6, 2016. Each year, the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival introduces New York audiences to cuttingedge international theatre-makers. Although several of the 2017 festival's headliners were anything but obscure, their work powerfully challenged mainstream (American) definitions of theatre, suggesting an expanded performance frame and questioning the efficacy of live theatre engagement. Variously pointing to the audience's role as co-creators of the event, the potential of hybrid embodied/digital technologies to facilitate intersubjective experience, and the inherent theatricality of seemingly objective cultural spaces, the three shows I attended injected a decidedly postdramatic and anti-consumerist aesthetic into the city's season. Touring since 2008, Phillipe Quesne's La Mélancholie des Dragonsinterrogated the limits and processes of theatrical spectacle, asking viewers to marvel at the mundane and to notice their own role in the processes of creating meaning. Situational rather than plot-driven, the piece centered on seven metalheads, broken down in a snowy parking lot, where they inventoried the low-tech attractions of their mobile theme park for a mechanic friend, Isabelle. Largely devoid of spoken language, her name became a beckoning refrain evocative of childhood wonder as the "artists" eagerly rehearsed their eventual park opening. While it seemed that we were to accept the realistic circumstances of their predicament, it was not long before the stranded rockers were peeling back cotton batting (snow) to get at electrical cables and dragging props on from offstage, thereby undermining any sense of realism and highlighting the multiple frames of theatre at work in this performance about a deferred performance. The simplicity of their amateur "theatre"—a bubble machine, wigs "dancing" in the wind, a fountain made from a tiny pump and a Rubbermaid container—initially inspired chuckles. However, by the end of the performance/demonstration (if one accepted their invitation to imagine, to play), there was no denying the force of their aesthetic as they recreated the rhythms and scale of their production research (showcased in their park "library") through increasingly grand theatrical gestures. Romantic paintings, Artaud's theatre theory, and an Appian vision of mass and light took form against a backdrop of ordinary people playing with simplistic techniques. Seduced by the performers' earnestness and led by Isabelle's wonder, viewers entered a park of the mind in which their own associations operated creatively, placing their active gazes at the center of the theatrical event. In this potent state of disarmed curiosity and mutual effort, simple acts like a Scorpions' song on acoustic guitar and recorder or a Chinese New Year-style parade with inflated tarp-dragons, became incredibly moving performances while also remaining rather funny. Both actor and audience herself, Isabelle functioned throughout as our surrogate in the process of immersion and participation that the park hoped to stage. Her sincerity challenged us to suspend judgment as she modeled a new ideal of spectation. And when she climbed a ladder amid a stream of smoke and bubbles to reproduce Wanderer above the Sea of Fogby Caspar David Friedrich, she appeared as co-(re)creator and primary spectator of the work, provoking our spectatorial/imaginative experience and drawing audience and performer together in perceptual solidarity. Her simultaneous insider/outsider status overturned easy assumptions about audience passivity and our role in creating spectacle; her easy naiveté encouraged us to follow her into the possibility of profundity as we watched her being swept away by the world she had both created and imagined. Putting his audience onstage, Quesne deconstructed illusion and conditioned expectations, finally evoking theatre in its simplest and most beautiful terms. Stemming from a desire to overcome a kind of existential melancholy (embodied in the...