Grand Challenge — Communicative Efficiency from a Multimodal Perspective

This event explored new perspectives on communicative efficiency by adding the visual modality into the picture and drawing insights from sign languages and multimodal communication. It featured International Sign (IS) interpreting.

Abstract

Communicative efficiency — the idea that speakers and listeners try to minimise the costs of communication while maximising the benefits (mutual understanding) — has been argued to shape the structure of languages. It is typically studied based on written representations of speech, overlooking the potential complementary contributions of other channels in face-to-face settings. The visual modality is a fundamental part of communication, either as the sole modality for linguistic expression (as in sign languages) or as a resource used alongside speech.

Anita Slonimska discusses recent studies on how affordances and constraints of the visual modality shape communicative efficiency in sign languages, revealing shared and distinct solutions for how linguistic systems optimise for efficiency. Gabriella Vigliocco then shifts from a unimodal to a multimodal perspective, discussing findings from the few studies of multimodal communicative efficiency and their implications. Finally, Natalia Levshina contextualises these directions within current theory before opening the floor for discussion.