Past event
Grand Challenge — Gesture, Voice & Face: What Do Different Modalities Afford for Communication?
BST (UK)
What do manual gestures, vocalisations, and facial expressions each fundamentally contribute to human communication? Three talks on the unique roles of each modality in language creation and signalling, and their interplay. (Note the unusual morning slot.)
Host
- Jonas Nölle — University of Glasgow
Speakers
- Jonas Nölle — University of Glasgow
“What's in a face? Semiotic capacities of facial expressions” - Nicolas Fay — University of Western Australia, Perth
“Evidence that gesture is the primary modality for language creation” - Marcus Perlman — University of Birmingham
“Vocalizations afford plenty of iconicity”
Agenda
- Opening remarks (MOSAIC team) — 1–2 min
- What's in a face? Semiotic capacities of facial expressions (Jonas Nölle) — 8 min
- Evidence that gesture is the primary modality for language creation (Nicolas Fay) — 15 min + 5 min Q&A
- Vocalizations afford plenty of iconicity (Marcus Perlman) — 15 min + 5 min Q&A
- Open discussion — 50 min
This session discussed what the different modalities — manual gestures, vocalisations, and facial expressions — fundamentally contribute to human communication. It uniquely took place in the morning to accommodate Nic Fay’s Australian time zone.
What’s in a face? Semiotic capacities of facial expressions (Jonas Nölle)
A brief introduction to the session, showcasing recent research from the FACESYNTAX ERC project. I argue that facial expressions possess greater semiotic potential than is commonly acknowledged, and raise two questions for discussion: Are facial expressions iconic? And do they form part of the same system as gestures?
Evidence that gesture is the primary modality for language creation (Nicolas Fay)
Laboratory simulations are increasingly used to inform theories of language origin. Using a “charades”-style referential game, I find that communication is twice as successful in the gesture modality than the (non-linguistic) vocal modality. This holds for adults and children, blind participants, and even cross-culturally. I argue that the success of gesture is due to its greater affordance for iconic and embodied signs.
Vocalizations afford plenty of iconicity (Marcus Perlman)
Do gestures afford more iconicity than vocalizations? I argue this is the wrong question. Vocalizations afford plenty of iconicity — more than enough to get a symbol system off the ground with a little time. The far more interesting questions lie in how and why iconic communication is multimodal, spread across the hands and body, face, and voice.