Apply for Research Postdoctoral Fellow - Center for Autism Research job with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Fellows, Students & Interns at...

Co-speech gestures emerge from the interaction between visuospatial experience and speech formulation, but what happens when visual experience is absent from birth? Blind individuals gesture in ways consistent with their native language, albeit they gesture less frequently. However, nothing is known about whether their gesture form differs from that of sighted individuals. Using computer vision technologies, this study examines whether gesture kinematics are shaped by visuospatial experience. In an auditory motion-description task, we analyzed spontaneous path-only gestures – depicting motion trajectories – produced by 20 congenitally blind, 21 blindfolded, and 21 sighted Turkish speakers. We assessed the gestures’ alignment with actual motion paths, along with duration and size. Blind participants produced gestures that were more precisely aligned with the motion trajectories, as well as larger and longer. These findings show that altered spatial cognition in blindness enhances gesture precision. The study underscores the role of sensorimotor experience in shaping gesture form.

In the world of science, breakthroughs often come from state-of-the-art labs with million-dollar equipment. But sometimes, they begin in a…

While some have touted that disagreement fuels the engine of scientific progress, researchers of conversational alignment have always known that having a mutual understanding of words and phrases is n...

Contemporary research on language and communication has expanded beyond its traditional focus on spoken and written forms to encompass signing, gestures, facial...

This is a tutorial about how to use the {marginaleffects} package to extract and plot predictions of interest from a statistical model.

Psychological researchers usually make sense of regression models by interpreting coefficient estimates directly. This works well enough for simple linear model...

Dynamic time warping (DTW) is a well-known algorithm used to assess the similarity between signals of varying lengths. Initially developed for automatic speech recognition, DTW has found applications in psycholinguistics, particularly in analyzing gesture form similarity. An open question in this domain is how effectively DTW captures gesture form similarity. Here, we validate DTW against human annotations of gesture form similarity across two multimodal interaction corpora and explore its utility as an automatic, continuous measure of gesture form similarity. Our findings reveal weak to moderate correlations between DTW distance and the number of similar gesture features – such as handshape, movement, orientation, and position – suggesting that DTW serves as a useful proxy for gesture form similarity. Additionally, we highlight the importance of qualitative analysis of raw data and DTW predictions in enhancing DTW’s predictive accuracy. Our study offers a rigorous validation of DTW as a measure of gesture form similarity and presents a detailed framework for preprocessing motion tracking data and calculating DTW distance. While none of the methods is perfect, the combination of automatic and manual measures provides a comprehensive approach to understanding and measuring gesture form similarity.

In this summer course, you'll explore how speech, gesture, and sign languages shape meaning and cognition in interaction.

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Nature Reviews Psychology - Language production and comprehension are often studied as separate processes, but they are intertwined in naturalistic conversation. In this Review, Holler and Kuhlen...

According to relevance theory, communication relies on speakers’ ability to signal relevant information, which addressees use to infer meaning efficiently. Most research within the relevance theore...

ALIGN 2.0: Modern Python package for multi-level linguistic alignment analysis. Faster, streamlined, and feature-rich while maintaining full compatibility with the original ALIGN methodology (Duran...

YouTube video by Wim Pouw

Three researchers at Radboud University will receive a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). They will receive a grant of rougly 1.5 million euros.