Description of events
The
Gesture Focus Group Speakers’ Series brings
distinguished researchers from the field of gesture
studies to the Stony Brook University community. The
Speakers’ Series is intended to expose interested
students to the research and methodological techniques
of international experts of the field through intensive
workshops. These workshops are intended to provide
advanced training for students already involved in
gesture-related research projects and to incite the
interest and provide theoretical and methodological
foundations to those new to the field.
The
first three events of the Speakers’ Series are aimed at
introducing students to different methodological
approaches for analyzing speech-accompanying gestures.
Susan Duncan's workshop provides
advanced training in theoretical and methodological
approaches for studying speech-accompanying gestures.
The first part of the workshop gives a theoretical
introduction to the study of gesture, with an emphasis
on the implications that the synchrony between gesture
and prosody has for language processing. The second part
of the workshop reviews different analytic approaches
for the study of gesture and demonstrates an approach
that is simultaneously fine-grained, focusing on
speech-gesture events that occur at time frames of a
second or less, and expansive in that it consults the
larger discourse context when judging what constitutes a
gesture and inferring its meaning. In the third part of
the workshop, participants have the opportunity to
present their current projects, practice coding gesture
data from their own corpora, and exchange ideas about
future research directions.
Cornelia Müller’s workshop
“Forms and
meanings of gestures: a linguistic approach to the
description and analysis of gestures”
(March 2 - 3, 2007), provided a theoretical introduction
to the field of gesture studies by bringing together
linguistic, primatological, and neurological approaches,
and included a tutorial on coding the physical features
of gestures.
Mandana Seyfeddinipur's workshop “Gesture
structure: phases, phrases and units” (Dec.1,2 2006) focused on coding
how gestures structurally unfold over time in relation
to speech .
We hope that we will continue to recruit successfully
new speakers for the Gesture Focus Group Speakers’
Series so that a continued dialog is established between
young Stony Brook researchers and the broader gesture
community.
Speaker Series: “Implications of
speech-gesture synchrony for theories of speech
production.”
Guest speaker:
Susan
Duncan, The University of Chicago
Date: 04/11/08 –
04/12/08
Synopsis of Gesture Focus Group’s Speaker Series Event with Dr. Susan
Duncan
Friday, April 11th 2008 (Location: PSY A 113)
10:00-10:30
Welcome
Session 1: Presentation of
empirical research
10:30 -1:30
Gesture and prosody in natural language use
Abstract:
Language production makes use of
speakers’ ability to shape, direct, and locate their
hands, and bodies in space and in relation to their
listeners and to objects in the environment. This
ability contributes to a cognitive and
social-interactional function: the elaboration, via
coverbal gesturing, of “material carriers” (McNeill &
Duncan 2000) of linguistic conceptualizations. This
presentation will consider what the tight integration of
gesture with semantically co-expressive constituents of
the speech stream at very small time intervals means for
theories of language production; in particular, examine
evidence that features of gesture production and speech
prosodic contouring co-vary in ways that suggest these
dimensions of expression are in some respects
manifestations of a single discourse process.
Three studies examine the effect on
discourse production of factors that expand
versus
constrict these dimensions of expression and allow us to
explore their relationship. The studies draw on
videotaped storytelling by speakers who describe events
in a cartoon they have seen. The first study manipulates
two factors: (1) speakers either describe single events
in isolation or describe those same events embedded in
full stories; (2) the order in which speakers describe
key events is manipulated, so that the events fit into
the storyline differently, prompting a different
discourse organization. Results show that iconically
depictive gestures and speech prosodic emphasis
synchronize to jointly highlight the same aspects of the
described events. However, which aspects are selected
for highlighting depends on the relationship of the
descriptive utterance to its discourse surrounds
(limited versus extended); on how (or whether) discourse
cohesion is being built and maintained. The second study
compares cartoon stories told by healthy individuals
with those of individuals with Parkinson’s Disease, a
neuromotor disorder that impedes bodily movement and
also tamps speakers’ prosodic expressive capability.
This comparison yields further evidence that gestures
function as material representations of meaning that
build and maintain discourse cohesion. The diminishment
of gesture and prosodic contouring, in Parkinson’s,
correlates with a fragmented and, in some details,
incoherent, narrative discourse style. The third study
is a pilot attempt to further map the extent of the
relatedness of coverbal gesture and speech prosody,
focusing on the prosodic dimension of vocal loudness.
Narrators were manipulated to recount the cartoon story
at softer versus louder voice volumes. Initial findings
are that gesture size and complexity increase with
increases in voice volume, further evidence suggesting
that coverbal gesture and speech prosody are a unified
dimension of communicative behavior.
1:30-2:30
Lunch Break
Session 2: Workshop on analytic
methods
2:30-5:00
Implications of gesture-speech synchrony for
psycholinguistic theory
Abstract:
Observations of the form, execution,
and meaning of the gestures that people unwittingly
produce when they speak have the potential to inform
psycholinguistic theories of language use. Manual and
bodily gestures reveal aspects of the visual, spatial,
and motoric imagery that feeds linguistic
conceptualization. The gestures that occur in extended
natural discourse contexts, such as storytelling or
conversation, are a proper target for observation and
theorizing about the functions of gesture in language.
However, the tremendous variability of speakers’
gestures in unconstrained contexts of language use
suggests that their forms, meanings, and timing in
relation to speech are shaped by many factors. This
variability poses a challenge to the search for
systematic patterning that can lead to solid
generalizations about the functions of gestures in
language. Many researchers meet this challenge by
reducing the problem space in various ways, including,
(1) a ‘case study’ approach of explicating all or
selected gestures in a single discourse, (2) controlled,
experimental elicitation of brief gesture-plus-speech
productions that are isolated from any discourse
context, (3) excerpting large numbers of gesture-speech
productions from natural discourses for comparison and
considering the contexts that shaped them as a source of
statistical ‘noise’ in the analysis. Though these
methods make the analytic problem more tractable, they
may also limit the reach of theoretical accounts of
gesturing. This workshop will demonstrate an approach to
analysis of spontaneous coverbal gestures in extended
natural discourse. The analytic approach is
simultaneously very fine-grained, focusing on
speech-gesture events that occur at time frames of a
second or less, and expansive in that the larger
discourse context is always consulted in the process of
judging what constitutes a gesture and inferring its
meaning. The analytic approach builds on the system
first described in detail in McNeill (1992). The
approach has been extended and refined, and some
assumptions altered, in the years since, in tandem with
the development of the ‘Growth Point’ theory of language
production (McNeill & Duncan 2000; McNeill 2005). In
demonstrating the process by which intervals of
meaningful gesture are identified in natural discourses,
their meanings inferred, and their interrelationships
with surrounding gestures explicated, a goal of this
workshop will be to show the connections between
parameters of the analysis and Growth Point theory.
5:00- 6:00
Summary & Discussion
Dinner at the
Curry Club (participation optional)
Saturday, April 12th 2008 (Location: PSY A 113)
Session 3: Symposium
10:30-10:45
Welcome
10:45- 11:30
The role of speech-gesture congruency and delay
in remembering action events
Alexia Galati, Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University
(in collaboration with Arty Samuel)
11:30- 12:15
Speakers’ adjustments to a distracted audience: How
speakers’ expectations and addressees’ feedback shape
narrating and gesturing
Anna Kuhlen, Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University
12:15-1:00
Lunch
1:00- 1:45
Audience-design and linguistic influence on the
production of emblematic gestures
Marwa Abdalla, Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University
1:45-2:30
The
communicative value of gesture: Are there differences
between first and second language production and
perception?
Alexandra Suppes, Department of Psychology, Columbia University
(in collaboration with Laura Garcia and Robert M.
Krauss)
2:30-2:45
Coffee
break
2:45-3:30
Discourse coherence and gesture interpretation
Matthew Stone, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers
University (in collaboration with Alex Lascarides)
More presentations
TBA.
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