Graduate and Postdoc Research Projects

Coordinating Conversation Multimodally: A Role for Shrug Gestures in Preference Organization
Natalie Dowling, Kennedy Casey
In this experiment we use a conversation analysis framework to ask how pragmatic shrug gestures perform functions like negotiating turn-taking, taking epistemic and affective stance, and positioning a speaker in relation to talk. We use anticipatory eye-tracking and responsive finger-tapping measures to monitor third-party observers’ experiences of everyday conversation to determine whether and how the presence of pragmatic gestures impacts the expectations we hold for cooperative, coordinated face-to-face discourse.

Memorability of Co-Speech Gestures
Hannah Guo, Michelle Madlansacay
Despite large individual differences in personal experience and memory performance, people tend to remember and forget the same visual information. Such effect has been shown in static images, videos, and dance movements. In this study, we investigate whether there are communicative gestures that are consistently better remembered by adults, and if so, what attributes could account for some gestures being more memorable than others.

Iconicity
Casey Ferrara
Although language has historically been defined as arbitrary and discrete, there are in fact many ways in which we incorporate iconicity and gradience into our communication, such as in the sentence “it’s been a looooooooooong day”. This project explores (1) how signers employ iconicity and gradience in their descriptions of events, (2) how this compares to non-signers using silent gesture to describe the same events, and now (3) how deaf signing children acquire this skill. Parts 1 and 2 of this work illuminate the way in which iconic depiction is shaped by linguistic constraints as well as broader gestural influences, while part 3 speaks to the role of iconicity in event encoding, and the interaction of gesture and sign in development.

Social Gestures
Anjana Lakshmi
We propose to study the non-verbal communication of stereotype content through gestures. Our work has three specific aims: (1) To demonstrate that people unwittingly gesture attitudinal inequities when they describe groups in terms of competence and warmth; (2) To examine whether some of these gestures are divorced from words – that is, whether people speak one attitude, but gesture another; and (3) To determine whether these unspoken gestures have an impact upon recipients’ impressions, emotions, and behaviors towards these groups.

Children’s Understanding of Multimodal Cues to (Un)certainty
Ben Morris
When other people tell us things— what time a friend’s party starts, or how to get somewhere—  we need to figure out how certain they are. Is what they’re saying definitely true, just a half-hearted guess, or somewhere in between? A lot of this information about someone’s certainty comes not from the words they use, but from their tone, facial expression, gestures, and more.  This project develops a new paradigm to test how very young children endorse what someone tells them differently depending on these multimodal cues to uncertainty.

Embodied prelinguistic communication between Tseltal Maya infants and their caregivers
Ruthe Foushee & Yuchen Jin
Long before we are talking or signing—even before we produce recognizable gestures—we are communicating. Here, we capture the communication between prelinguistic infants and their caregivers in a Tseltal Maya context where infants spend their days physically attached to their mothers, precluding the face-to-face verbal engagement familiar to Western caregiving contexts, but allowing for continuous embodied communication. To do so, we take advantage of a scheme for extracting meaningful event descriptions from noisy audiostreams to “look inside” the sling in which infants are carried, for evidence of contingency between infants’ movements against their mothers and mothers’ response behaviors.

What are children learning about communication from the verbal and nonverbal contingencies of their caregivers’ responsiveness?
Michelle Madlansacay & Ruthe Foushee

How much of sign languages is gestural?
Abby Clements