Single Gesture Research Articles

Place assimilation is not the result of gestural overlap: evidence from Korean and English

In the theory of articulatory phonology Browman & Goldstein (1986, 1990, 1992) claim that place assimilation is mainly the result of the overlap of gestures and the perception of these overlapping gestures as a single gesture. Ohala (1990) makes a similar claim. The present study provides interesting experimental evidence against this explanation of assimilation as a result of gestural overlap and resulting misperception, and for the importance of gestural reduction.

Only Tongue Protrusion Modeling Is Matched by Neonates

Studies claiming to have demonstrated facial imitation in the neonatal period are often cited as evidence that rudimentary representational abilities are present at birth. A critical examination of nine studies with infants ranging in average age from 2 days to 7 weeks demonstrates that the claims of early imitative abilities are not well founded. All nine studies investigated the imitation of tongue protrusion (TP) and one other gesture: head movement (HM) in one study and mouth opening (MO) in eight studies. Two studies acknowledged that there was a modeling effect for TP but not for MO. The remaining studies claimed to have obtained effects not just for TP but also for the other gesture investigated (MO or HM). But a close examination of these studies shows that in contrast to the TP effect, which was clear and consistent, the MO and HM effects were weak and inconsistent and in some cases derived from the TP effect. Because the matching behavior found is restricted to a single gesture, it is best explained as a specific, directly elicited response, rather than imitation.

Analysis of praxis task demands in the assessment of children with developmental motor deficits

Children with developmental motor deficits and normal control children were evaluated with a battery of praxis tests. Several task demands were examined: representational nature of the gesture, type of limb gesture (transitive vs. intransitive), input modality (command vs. imitation), movement complexity (single gestures vs. sequences of gestures), and movement system (limb vs. orofacial). Performance of the children with developmental motor deficits was significantly lower than that of the normal control children on most of the tasks. Specifically, the children with motor deficits demonstrated impairments in performance of both representational and nonrepresentational gestures relative to the normal controls. Further, they demonstrated impairments in their performance of gestures across different movement systems (i.e., limb, oral) compared to the normal controls. Examination of task demands indicated that, for children with motor deficits, complex gestures were performed less well than single gestures, ...

Analysis of task demands in Apraxia

Several task demands were examined in a battery of praxis tests: the movement system (limb versus axial), input modality (command versus imitation), movement complexity (single gestures versus a sequence of gestures), type of limb gesture (transitive versus intransitive), and the representational nature of the gestures. Performance accuracy for a group of left hemisphere patients was significantly lower than for two other groups of patients with either right hemisphere damage or no brain damage on all gestures. The right hemisphere patients were significantly different from the normals only for the most complex gestures involving a three movement sequence. Within the left hemisphere group performance to command was not different from imitation. Representational and nonrepresentational gestures were not different, and axial gestures was not different from the limb gestures. The transitive and complex gestures were not different but were both performed less accurately than the intransitive gestures. The implications of these findings for understanding apraxia were discussed.

Instruments That Learn, Refined Controllers, and Source Model Loudspeakers

On this occasion of the celebration of John Pierce's 80th birthday, I would like to share with you three wishes for future developments in computer music. The technologies that I propose are already in the air and experimentation is under way, but more computational horsepower, better theory and practice, and cost-effective implementations will be required before these proposed dream machine technologies can grow into real musical use. I should share my biases with you at the onset to help motivate and limit these speculations. First of all, I come from a jazz background. I am very interested in improvisation. I like to hear and participate in musical discourse; by this I mean a kind of social activity that goes on within a group of musicians who are mutually influencing each other. I love to observe this exchange. It is evident in jazz performances of a high caliber and in folk musics from all over the world. Classical Indian music provides many more examples. Another bias my jazz background provides is a desire for a very personalized musical performance style, including the phrasing, articulation, and sound itself. The highly personalized sound of a John Coltrane, a Miles Davis, or a Steve Lacy allows one to identify them with just one note. I am disappointed that players of computer-based musical instrumentation have not yet, to my ear at least, developed such compelling personal sound styles. I believe that control intimacy is one of the critical missing elements, so much of what I propose is concerned with a tight coupling between gesture and instrumental response. Computer music technology brings something new to the gestureresponse coupling problem. Acoustic instruments, with few exceptions, work on a one-gesture-onesound basis. Computer instrumentation allows us to use a single gesture to launch an entire pattern of notes. How the gesture influences the course of the pattern in a musically expressive manner is an issue of real concern.

Speech-act theory revisited: Rule notions and reader-oriented criticism

The analogy between interpretive norms and various types of linguistic rules is central to reader-oriented criticism. In particular, critics have related speech-act institutions and speech-act rules to institutionalized critical practices and literary reading operations. This paper first examines an especially influential speech-act account, John Searle's Speech Acts, and finds some conflation of rule descriptions of pre-existing institutions and individual actions invoking institutional norms. It then argues there is a similar confusion of explanatory goals in rule-based critical discussions, often resulting in a variety of behaviors and phenomena (conscious and unconscious interpretive actions, definitional genre statements, literary-specific and general inference-making) explicated with a single gesture toward linguistic and speech-act analogies. These problems eventually culminate in the contradictory rhetoric of the recent ‘Against Theory’ debate (rule-based critical analogies are politically repressive; yet recognition of interpretive constraints produces critical freedom).

Limb and oral praxic abilities of children with verbal sequencing deficits.

This study was concerned with children with impaired articulation, with a specific deficit in verbal sequences of consonant-vowel syllables; i.e. verbal sequenced motion rate (SMR). Speech-disordered children with and without this SMR disorder were compared with a group of control children on their performance of single limb and oral gestures and sequences of limb and oral gestures. Performances of an action requiring four different responses and of one requiring the same repeated response were also examined. The children with verbal SMR disorder had greater difficulty in performing both single and sequences of limb and oral gestures compared with the other two groups, as they also had in the task requiring four different responses. There were no differences between the groups in the task requiring the same repeated response. These findings suggest that children with verbal SMR disorder may have a generalized motor disorder which affects performance of both single gestures and sequences of gestures.

Images of meditation, uncertainty and repentance in ancient art

Tracing back the history of a single gesture from a painting by Caravaggio to the portrait statue of Demosthenes by Polyeuktos, the problem of its meaning is first posed in terms of iconographical tradition. On the other side, the mutual relation between this gesture and its meaning is not a fixed one: one and the same gesture can cover some different (and even opposite) meanings, and conversely one and the same meaning can be conveyed by some different gestures. Some ways of describing and focusing this changing connection (seen as one of signifier and signified) are suggested.

Stage Designs of a Single Gesture: The Early Work of Robert Edmond Jones

Stage Designs of a Single Gesture: The Early Work of Robert Edmond Jones

SOUTHERN SUDANESE POLITICS SINCE THE ADDIS ABABA AGREEMENT*

PERHAPS THE MOST surprising though certainly gratifying consequence of the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972 has been the successful maintenance of peace in the new Southern Region of the Sudan. A steadily growing civil war, showing increasing indications of international involvement, was suddenly stopped in March 1972 following negotiations between representatives of the Sudan Government and delegates selected by the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM). Four years later members of both the national and regional governments remain committed to making the settlement succeed. The agreement has established the rules for postwar politics in the South and appears to be gaining a permanent and functional role in the political system of the Sudan. However, that judgment must remain in doubt for some time. Many difficulties make its continuation precarious. And both pervasive suspicion and a few scattered violent incidents serve as reminders that civil wars, like Gordian knots, cannot be entirely resolved by a single dramatic gesture. The present political difficulties of the South are a product not only of the civil war, but also of the manner in which that war was settled. The agreement has unavoidably created new issues while halting the infinitely more serious problem of violent aggression. How well the political rules resulting from the agreement can handle these new disputes will determine whether the new political system will be institutionalized and how rapidly. Institutionalization is the process through which most active participants in a polity come to value highly a set of basic procedures for solving disputes1. The agreement provided novel but untested procedures for the Southern Region, but the development of the new relationship between

The Immortality of Man

Let us think of the human being, not in an abstract and general way, but in the most concrete possible, the most personal fashion. Let us think of this certain old man we have known for years in the country, —this old farmer with his wrinkled face, his keen eyes which have beheld so many harvests and so many earthly horizons, his long habits of patience and suffering, courage, poverty and noble labor, a man perhaps like those parents of a great living American statesman whose photographs appeared some months ago in a particularly moving copy of a weekly magazine. Or let us think of this certain boy or this girl who are our relatives or our friends, whose everyday life we well know, and whose loved appearance, whose soft or husky voice is enough to rejoice our hearts. Let us remember—remember in our heart—a single gesture of the hand, or the smile in the eyes of one we love. What treasures on earth, what masterpieces of art or of science, could pay for the treasures of life, feeling, freedom and memory, of which this gesture, this smile is the fugitive expression? We perceive intuitively, in an indescribable not inescapable flash, that nothing in the world is more precious than one single human being. I am well aware how many difficult questions come to mind at the same time and I shall come back to these difficulties, but for the present I wish only to keep in mind this simple and decisive intuition, by means of which the incomparable value of the human person is revealed to us. Moreover, St. Thomas Aquinas warns us that the Person is what is noblest and most perfect in the whole of nature.