Non-verbal Actions Research Articles

Action Semantics at the Bottom of the Brain: Insights From Dysplastic Cerebellar Gangliocytoma.

Recent embodied cognition research shows that access to action verbs in shallow-processing tasks becomes selectively compromised upon atrophy of the cerebellum, a critical motor region. Here we assessed whether cerebellar damage also disturbs explicit semantic processing of action pictures and its integration with ongoing motor responses. We evaluated a cognitively preserved 33-year-old man with severe dysplastic cerebellar gangliocytoma (Lhermitte-Duclos disease), encompassing most of the right cerebellum and the posterior part of the left cerebellum. The patient and eight healthy controls completed two semantic association tasks (involving pictures of objects and actions, respectively) that required motor responses. Accuracy results via Crawford’s modified t-tests revealed that the patient was selectively impaired in action association. Moreover, reaction-time analysis through Crawford’s Revised Standardized Difference Test showed that, while processing of action concepts involved slower manual responses in controls, no such effect was observed in the patient, suggesting that motor-semantic integration dynamics may be compromised following cerebellar damage. Notably, a Bayesian Test for a Deficit allowing for Covariates revealed that these patterns remained after covarying for executive performance, indicating that they were not secondary to extra-linguistic impairments. Taken together, our results extend incipient findings on the embodied functions of the cerebellum, offering unprecedented evidence of its crucial role in processing non-verbal action meanings and integrating them with concomitant movements. These findings illuminate the relatively unexplored semantic functions of this region while calling for extensions of motor cognition models.

Medical education and leadership: a call to action for Brazil's mental health system.

Medical education and leadership: a call to action for Brazil's mental health system.

PERIHAL SUFISTIK DALAM NOVEL BEKISAR MERAH KARYA AHMAD TOHARI: SEBUAH PENDEKATAN SEMIOTIKA

This research aims to describe: (1) the significance of Bekisar Merah based on the Riffaterre semiotics approach and (2) the sufistic matter in the novel Bekisar Merah. This research is a qualitative research. Data of this study are narrative and/or dialogue in the novel which refers to the concept used as an analytical device, namely sufism. The narrative and dialogue are materialized in the clauses, sentences, and paragraphs form. Source of primary data used in this research is the novel Bekisar Merah by Ahmad Tohari. Researchers act as research instruments. To acquire data from primary source, this study uses observation as one of the data collection method, especially reading technique. This study also uses documentation methods in order to acquire and collect data from other relevant referral sources. This study uses hermeneutic methods and using data analysis techniques formulated by Miles & Huberman. After Bekisar Merah was analyzed based on Riffaterre's semiotics approach with a sufism perspective, several conclusions were found. (1) Semiotically, in Bekisar Merah, there are only two types of indirect expression with sufistic nuance, namely displacement of meaning and distorting of meaning. The matrix of Bekisar Merah is eling, especially eling in the context of revisionist neosufism. The matrix is transformed into model (characters), and the model is transformed into variants (nonverbal actions, verbal actions and mental actions in the form of thoughts or feelings). Bekisar Merah’s hypogram is Suluk Wujil. Intertextual pattern relations of Bekisar Merah-Suluk Wujil is innovation, takes place in at least four literary dimensions (content, form, symbolism and character). (2) The matter of sufism philosophy, ethics, and methods is conveyed by indirect delivery. Its medium is the structure, that is the instrinsic novel elements: characters and characterizations, plots, and—in small portions—setting.

An agential realist perspective on the construction and flow of knowledge: the case of dynamic entanglement and “cuts” within an aircraft engine manufacturing workplace

PurposeThis paper aims to show agential realism as the basis for a pertinent framework with regard to the entwined, on-going and interpretative aspects of knowledge.Design/methodology/approachThe knowledge flow phenomenon in the form of entanglement and agential “cuts” within the workplace is studied and described across a phenomenological ethnographic case study of two workgroups within an aircraft engine manufacturing context.FindingsThe boundary construction phenomenon is a key process helping us to depict knowledge entanglement (tacit and explicit) across dialogue and non-verbal actions. Dialogue brings forth the aspect of knowledge as interpretations or “cuts.” A phenomenological analysis allows us to identify and describe various levels of tacit–explicit knowledge entanglement depending on the mode of coping at hand. Also highlighted was the importance of heuristics carried out by knowledge experts, often in the form of abduction (i.e. leading to rules of thumb).Research limitations/implicationsIt is acknowledged that the relatively narrow context of the empirical work limits the ability to generalize the findings and arguments. As such, additional work is required to investigate the validity of the findings across a wider spectrum of workgroup contexts.Practical implicationsAgential realism allows for the analysis of organizations as a world of practice and actions, whereby long-established categories can be requestioned and challenged with the aim of sharing the full richness and benefit of embodied knowledge between human actors.Originality/valueEthnographic descriptions of the entwined nature of tacit and explicit knowledge, the embodied and activity-based dimension of knowledge and learning, as well as the characteristic of knowledge as possession, correspond well to an agential realist concept of phenomenon, entanglement and cuts. Furthermore, agential realism offers the opportunity to view the workplace as individuals (or groups) who act out embodied tacit-explicit knowledge in conjunction with non-human entities (such as objects, as well as communication and information technologies), with the latter acting as enhancers of knowledge creation and sharing.

Instructed Vision: Navigating Grammatical Rules by Using Landmarks for Linguistic Structures in Corrective Feedback Sequences

AbstractThis study aims to show how multimodality, that is, the mobilization of various communicative resources in social actions (Mondada, 2016), can be used to teach grammar. Drawing on ethnomethodological conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992), the article provides a detailed analysis of 2 corrective feedback sequences in a Swedish‐as‐a‐second‐language classroom. It shows that teaching grammar using corrective feedback sequences is a collaborative activity between teachers and students, which requires both verbal and other embodied practices. Specifically, it demonstrates how the teachers made grammatical constructs visible, noticeable, and thus learnable through the use of multiple resources such as annotating and illustrating on a whiteboard or projection screen, using concrete meta‐talk (Storch, 2008), together with nonverbal actions such as gesturing. The article argues that the practice of marking a linguistic structure through multiple resources creates ‘landmarks’ for teaching purposes. These landmarks were used (a) for an instructed vision through which the intelligibility of abstract grammatical concepts and relations as cognitive phenomena is constituted by a concrete set of observable and reportable actions, and (b) as prompts in organizing knowledge not only for the purpose of the current activity of teaching but also for future occasions.

COMMUNICATIVE INFLUENCE IN ENGLISH IDEATION DISCOURSE: RESPONSIVE STRATEGIES (BASED ON TED INTERNET PLATFORM)

The article focuses on identification and description of the responsive strategies realized by the subjects of English ideation discourse. The term English ideation discourse encompasses a process and result of the communicants’ interaction in the social-cultural context of a public speech. The subjects of such a discourse are the ideator and the recipient(-s) who take part in the cognitive-communicative activity in order to accept and apply the idea that is the object of this interaction. The idea refers to a mental structure translated into verbal and non-verbal means of communication. The ideator’s global socially relevant communicative aim is to exert communicative influence on the recipients, so that they will put the idea into social action. This aim is achieved through the initial communicative strategies of informing, persuading and instructing that govern the sub-strategies: informative, informative-persuasive, persuasive, persuasive-instructive, and instructive. Sub-strategies are aimed at different spheres of the recipients’ consciousness – rational reasoning (informative, informative-persuasive), emotions (persuasive), volition (instructive) or at the subconsciousness (persuasive-instructive). Responsive communicative actions of the recipients are divided into instant (verbal: exclamations, short answers; non-verbal: laughter, applause, gestures) and delayed (verbal: rating an ideation speech by choosing three out of fourteen available adjectives of positive / negative evaluation; non-verbal: general and average monthly number of views of the video recording of an ideation speech). The study is pioneering a systematic cognitive-communicative methodology which reveals constitutive features of a new object of linguistic analysis – English ideation discourse – and provides the tool of inferential analysis to identify and describe rational, emotional, volitional communicative influence with relevant to this influence responsive strategies that are exerted by the subjects of the ideation discourse and are manifested in their verbal and non-verbal actions.

EVALUATIVE RESPONSES IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION

The process of communication implies information exchange, mutual influence, and evaluation of speakers. An addressee is an important participant of this process, yet little is known about him as a person who receives and evaluates an addresser’s utterance. This is particularly significant because the addressee influences the further course of communication by his/her own responses due to the rules of turn taking. An evaluative response is thus an evaluative speech act that serves as the perlocutionary effect of an addresser’s utterance and simultaneously expresses some intention concerning an interlocutor. The present paper aims to identify, classify and analyse the types of evaluative responses from a pragmatic perspective. The empirical material consists of 30 modern American and British novels, or 3400 dialogues containing evaluative responses. The theoretical basis of the investigation integrates the main principles of pragmalinguistics and speech act theory. In view of this, we suggested a pragmatic typology of evaluative responses based on an addressee’s speech reaction to the received stimulus. The study claims the universality of an evaluative response as a speech act. It may provide not only emotional perception of reality but also contribute to its adequate comprehension and even exert direct or hidden influence on verbal and nonverbal actions of an interlocutor.

Peaches for Lunch: Creating and Using Visual Variables

ABSTRACTIn this article, I describe the process of systematically including nonverbal data in medical anthropology research. I demonstrate the process of visualizing and coding videotaped moments of life and show how we can analyze what is being done along with what is being said. I ground my discussion in toddler language socialization and then expand my observations to the realm of language pathologies. Aphasia from strokes, speech difficulties in neurologically based illnesses like Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the variety of communication challenges that face those on the autism spectrum can all be studied in interesting ways by including precise descriptions of nonverbal actions. I discuss the process of recording and coding the data with the software Observer XT 11.5 by Noldus. This method of collecting and analyzing video data can be used for many anthropological questions, in addition to those concerned with communication.

Symbolic Insult in Diplomacy

AbstractThis paper approaches symbolic insult in diplomacy as the use of symbolic means by states to oppress the opponent’s sense of Self, to hurt its self-esteem and social status in order to achieve their foreign policy objectives, or as a reaction to a threat from Other. The paper posits that diplomatic actors are extremely sensitive to Self related matters, and may use such sensitivity for influencing each other, bargaining over the issues of importance, and simply defending their sense of Self while they confront the opponent. The enormous importance of collective Self in diplomacy may instigate a variety of social strategic games, including tacit and deceptive ones. The diplomatic actor’s acute sensitivity to recognition, honor and social status sharpens its sense of Self, which makes any humiliation painful. Therefore, protection of self-regard, dignity and public face becomes a critical issue in diplomatic practice. At the same time, that makes the diplomatic actor’s Self vulnerable, and provides the opposing Other opportunities for manipulation and symbolic abuse.The paper argues that symbolic insult in diplomacy occurs in a highly normative environment, and depends on political objectives, shared knowledge, social perception and practices, and can negatively affect relationships between diplomatic actors, the opponent’s self-perception, self-feeling and security of Self—ontological security. I distinguish three forms of symbolic insult used in diplomacy: by misrecognition (“diplomatic bypassing”), direct confrontation (“diplomatic punch”) and concealed verbal or nonverbal actions (“diplomatic slap”). The paper focuses on the third, indirect form, or “diplomatic slap” which employs obscure symbolic insults as a means of tacit manipulation for influencing the opponent, or as an instrument of restoring social status.By highlighting interest-based (political), value-based (moral), relationship-based (social) and right-based (legal) imperatives of international diplomacy, this paper shows that diplomatic actors can use symbolically expressed but subtle “slap” for balancing their interests and relationships in dealing with the opponent: Tacit or implicit symbolic insult usually appears ambiguous which may allow the offender to promote its interests but also to stay engaged with the victim.

01. Go Edvin! Pedagogical structuring of activities to support toddler participation in an early childcare programme

The present paper addresses children’s participation through pedagogical structuring in an early childcare programme in Australia. Research shows inequality in participatory opportunities depending on skills in the spoken (majority) language. Against this background, the focus in the present study is on participatory opportunities for toddlers with a first language other than English. The toddlers’ participation was video recorded over a six-week period. Participatory opportunities are understood in terms of pedagogical structuring, with an institutional and an interactional level. Through the use of a model of conditions for participation as an analytic tool, teachers’ attending to children’s perspective as a starting point for guidance is shown to characterize the pedagogical structuring. Non-verbal actions can become a useful tool for interaction, and offer a starting point for experiencing extended communication at an early age. In addition, the study shows an alternative way of interpreting decision-making in relation to the youngest children. A pedagogy built on a nuanced understanding of conditions for participation is emphasized and discussed.International Research in Early Childhood Education, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 2–15

Teacher’s conceptions of quality in dance education expressed through grade conferences

AbstractThe aim of the study is to illuminate a teacher‘s conceptions of quality expressed through verbal and non-verbal actions in relation to summative assessments of dance knowledge. The following research questions are considered in the study: What conceptions of quality emerge during grade conferences? In what ways do teacher’s conceptions of quality reflect knowledge hierarchies? How do the teacher’s and student’s conceptions of quality relate to each other? To grasp the phenomenon, material was gathered during observations in a Swedish upper secondary school and from the teacher’s written reflections. Individual grading conversations were observed between the teacher and ten students attending a course called Dance technique 1. In the analytical process, the phenomenon was seen, broadened out, varied, and then condensed into two themes: conceptions of quality expressed through the teacher‘s focus on abilities and conceptions of quality expressed through views on the progression of dance knowledge.

Overcoming Perpetual Estrangement in Persuasion’s Heterotopia

This essay offers a detailed reading of the published and cancelled endings of Jane Austen’s Persuasion with a special focus on the conjunction of spaces, bodies, and democracy. The essay suggests that both endings are concerned with the restoration of affinity between the estranged protagonists, but the published version evinces a keener understanding of affinity as a matter of communication between bodies, words, and spaces. This understanding reflects the choice of the hotel room as the location of the novel’s dénouement. The choice of a heterotopic place enhances the superimposition of public and private spaces, the affinity between the hotel (drawing) room, the world and the stage. Enacted within such a cluster of associations, romance signifies a more than personal affair, while theatricality emerges as a stylistic technique with communal implications. Hence, the dénouement in the heterotopia is ethically consequential. Taking cue from Hannah Arendt’s insights on theatricality and Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, we come to see that, by deepening the interplay between spaces, verbal, and non-verbal action, the published ending opts for a democratic process of judgment-formation that incorporates and exceeds dichotomies such as private and public, body and mind, feeling and reason.

Politeness Strategies in Arabic Culture with Reference to Eulogy

The present paper discusses an important subject in pragmatics: politeness strategies with reference to Arabic. At the beginning, it sheds the light upon some basic cultural facts which are necessary for everyday social interaction. Arab people have a set of verbal and non-verbal actions which should be respected by native citizens and foreigners as well. If a person violates these norms, this will lead to unsuccessful communication. These involve polite behavior towards adults, women, neighbours and strangers. The second part of the paper concentrates on one literary genre in Arabic i.e. 'praise'. Arab Poets pay great attention to praise because of the reward they get from kings and leaders. The study focuses on the impact of praise to maintain politeness in social communication. It concludes that Arab poets use images from their culture such as courage, generosity and nature to describe their kings. They resort to positive politeness through making reference to the superiority and high prestige of kings

The Analyst’s Body at Work: Utilizing Touch and Sensory Experience in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies

This paper discusses the functions of somatic experience within the therapeutic and analytic processes as both the nonverbal expression of conflicts long held within the patient’s (or analyst’s) body structure as well as a movement toward self-agency. Therapeutic attention and responsiveness to nonverbal communications and spontaneous bodily actions are seen as providing significant avenues of access to the forward intentionality of unconscious, dissociated states of being. Direct, analytic involvement with somatic experience is illustrated through sensate focus, movement, and physical contact between patient and therapist.

Affective Personalization of a Social Robot Tutor for Children’s Second Language Skills

Though substantial research has been dedicated towards using technology to improve education, no current methods are as effective as one-on-one tutoring. A critical, though relatively understudied, aspect of effective tutoring is modulating the student's affective state throughout the tutoring session in order to maximize long-term learning gains. We developed an integrated experimental paradigm in which children play a second-language learning game on a tablet, in collaboration with a fully autonomous social robotic learning companion. As part of the system, we measured children's valence and engagement via an automatic facial expression analysis system. These signals were combined into a reward signal that fed into the robot's affective reinforcement learning algorithm. Over several sessions, the robot played the game and personalized its motivational strategies (using verbal and non-verbal actions) to each student. We evaluated this system with 34 children in preschool classrooms for a duration of two months. We saw that (1) children learned new words from the repeated tutoring sessions, (2) the affective policy personalized to students over the duration of the study, and (3) students who interacted with a robot that personalized its affective feedback strategy showed a significant increase in valence, as compared to students who interacted with a non-personalizing robot. This integrated system of tablet-based educational content, affective sensing, affective policy learning, and an autonomous social robot holds great promise for a more comprehensive approach to personalized tutoring.

Intersubjectivity or Preference: Interpreting Student Pauses in Supervisory Meetings

This paper focuses on supervision in the context of higher education. It highlights the interactional complexities inherent in regular supervisory meetings between supervisor and student as they negotiate the institutional goal of achieving a successful PhD outcome. Close analysis of supervisory meetings shows that students sometimes pause following their supervisor's talk, when a response or an uptake is due. The question for supervisors, especially of international students, is how to treat student pauses, given that such pauses could either foreshadow a dispreferred response or a problem of intersubjectivity. Drawing on the methodology of conversation analysis and using data from supervision meetings of international engineering PhD students, this paper examines how supervisors are often able to appropriately identify the nature of a potentially ambiguous pause through an understanding of epistemics or knowledge of who knows what. Resources that supervisors use to correctly interpret a student pause also include a student's non-verbal actions, such as gaze direction, and changes in facial expression.

The ontogenesis of narrative: from moving to meaning.

Narrative, the creation of imaginative projects and experiences displayed in expressions of movement and voice, is how human cooperative understanding grows. Human understanding places the character and qualities of objects and events of interest within stories that portray intentions, feelings, and ambitions, and how one cares about them. Understanding the development of narrative is therefore essential for understanding the development of human intelligence, but its early origins are obscure. We identify the origins of narrative in the innate sensorimotor intelligence of a hypermobile human body and trace the ontogenesis of narrative form from its earliest expression in movement. Intelligent planning, with self-awareness, is evident in the gestures and motor expressions of the mid-gestation fetus. After birth, single intentions become serially organized into projects with increasingly ambitious distal goals and social meaning. The infant imitates others’ actions in shared tasks, learns conventional cultural practices, and adapts his own inventions, then names topics of interest. Through every stage, in simple intentions of fetal movement, in social imitations of the neonate, in early proto-conversations and collaborative play of infants and talk of children and adults, the narrative form of creative agency with it four-part structure of ‘introduction,’ ‘development,’ ‘climax,’ and ‘resolution’ is present. We conclude that shared rituals of culture and practical techniques develop from a fundamental psycho-motor structure with its basic, vital impulses for action and generative process of thought-in-action that express an integrated, imaginative, and sociable Self. This basic structure is evident before birth and invariant in form throughout life. Serial organization of single, non-verbal actions into complex projects of expressive and explorative sense-making become conventional meanings and explanations with propositional narrative power. Understanding the root of narrative in embodied meaning-making in this way is important for practical work in therapy and education, and for advancing philosophy and neuroscience.

Lifting the veil on the PRP–client relationship

The research used videotaped ethnographic observation and analysis of verbal and non-verbal actions to examine how a public relations practitioner (PRP) handled a client during a time of financial crisis in the client’s organization. Three interactions in which the PRP discussed media messaging with his client were analysed to discover what techniques the PRP employed and how much influence he had in constructing and disseminating the organization’s media strategy. The research provides rare empirical evidence of the day-to-day practices of PRPs in consultancy–client relationships, which is an area under-examined by researchers. The analysis found the relationship was characterized by competing interests and information asymmetry, which often hampered collaboration and reduced PRP influence.

This Robot is Sociable: Close-up on the Gestures and Measured Motion of a Human Responding to a Proactive Robot

During an unannounced encounter, we study the appreciation of the robot’s sociable character (measured via the answers to a questionnaire) and the motion (arm and head movement frequency and smoothness using IMU sensors) of two humans interacting with a proactive humanoid, knowing that the experiment involves twenty pairs of participants. We also investigate the dependencies between the participants’ response to the robot’s non-verbal actions and their perception of its sociability. Our results show that the more the humans find the robot sociable, the more they tend to respond to its engaging gestures and the higher is the frequency of their arm motion and the smoothness of their head motion when interacting with it. Therefore, these results show that measurable physical movements might be significant indicators to investigate a social robot’s sociable character from the human partner’s point of view, as well as to possibly infer the human tendency to interact with it. More generally, the sociable trait attributed to an assistive robot operating in a public or in a private environment, seems to be one of the keys to the success of human-robot interactions.

Adding learning resources: a study of two toddlers' modes and trajectories of participation in early childhood education

This study focuses on the nature of children's participation in an Australian early childhood context in which their second language is used. The aim is to create knowledge of toddlers' modes and trajectories of participation. Empirical data documenting the participation of two toddlers were gathered through video observations of everyday activities in the childcare programme across six weeks. The concepts of legitimate peripheral participation and changed participation were used as analytical tools for interpreting the empirical data. Interaction of the toddlers is illustrated through images and transcripts. The analysis show how their participation is carried out through non-verbal communication in silence and movement, and how the toddlers moved, in different ways, towards coordinating activities with other children. The children's trajectories illustrate how they come to participate in different ways and with additional learning resources. How the pedagogical approach acknowledges non-verbal actions and offers multiple modes and trajectories of participation is discussed.