Gesture and Speech in Interaction - 4th edition (GESPIN 4)
Abstract
The fourth edition of Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GESPIN) was held in Nantes, France. With more than 40 papers, these proceedings show just what a flourishing field of enquiry gesture studies continues to be.
The keynote speeches of the conference addressed three different aspects of multimodal interaction:
gesture and grammar, gesture acquisition, and gesture and social interaction. In a talk entitled Qualities
of event construal in speech and gesture: Aspect and tense, Alan Cienki presented an ongoing research
project on narratives in French, German and Russian, a project that focuses especially on the verbal and
gestural expression of grammatical tense and aspect in narratives in the three languages. Jean-Marc
Colletta's talk, entitled Gesture and Language Development: towards a unified theoretical framework,
described the joint acquisition and development of speech and early conventional and representational
gestures. In Grammar, deixis, and multimodality between code-manifestation and code-integration or why
Kendon's Continuum should be transformed into a gestural circle, Ellen Fricke proposed a revisited
grammar of noun phrases that integrates gestures as part of the semiotic and typological codes of individual
languages. From a pragmatic and cognitive perspective, Judith Holler explored the use of
gaze and hand gestures as means of organizing turns at talk as well as establishing common ground in a
presentation entitled On the pragmatics of multi-modal face-to-face communication: Gesture, speech and
gaze in the coordination of mental states and social interaction.
Among the talks and posters presented at the conference, the vast majority of topics related, quite
naturally, to gesture and speech in interaction - understood both in terms of mapping of units in different
semiotic modes and of the use of gesture and speech in social interaction. Several presentations explored the effects of impairments
(such as diseases or the natural ageing process) on gesture and speech. The communicative relevance of
gesture and speech and audience-design in natural interactions, as well as in more controlled settings like
television debates and reports, was another topic addressed during the conference. Some participants
also presented research on first and second language learning, while others discussed the relationship
between gesture and intonation. While most participants presented research on gesture and speech from
an observer's perspective, be it in semiotics or pragmatics, some nevertheless focused on another important
aspect: the cognitive processes involved in language production and perception. Last but not least,
participants also presented talks and posters on the computational analysis of gestures, whether involving
external devices (e.g. mocap, kinect) or concerning the use of specially-designed computer software for
the post-treatment of gestural data. Importantly, new links were made between semiotics and mocap data.
Domains
Linguistics
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)