Publications

Abstract

During face-to-face communication, one does not only hear speech but also see a speaker's communicative hand movements. It has been shown that such hand gestures play an important role in communication where the two modalities influence each other's interpretation. A gesture typically temporally overlaps with coexpressive speech, but the gesture is often initiated before (but not after) the coexpressive speech. The present ERP study investigated what degree of asynchrony in the speech and gesture onsets are optimal for semantic integration of the concurrent gesture and speech. Videos of a person gesturing were combined with speech segments that were either semantically congruent or incongruent with the gesture. Although gesture and speech always overlapped in time, gesture and speech were presented with three different degrees of asynchrony. In the SOA 0 condition, the gesture onset and the speech onset were simultaneous. In the SOA 160 and 360 conditions, speech was delayed by 160 and 360 msec, respectively. ERPs time locked to speech onset showed a significant difference between semantically congruent versus incongruent gesture–speech combinations on the N400 for the SOA 0 and 160 conditions. No significant difference was found for the SOA 360 condition. These results imply that speech and gesture are integrated most efficiently when the differences in onsets do not exceed a certain time span because of the fact that iconic gestures need speech to be disambiguated in a way relevant to the speech context.

Abstract

Even though most studies of language have focused on speech channel and/or viewed language as an
amodal abstract system, there is growing evidence on the role our bodily actions/ perceptions play in language and communication.
In this context, Özyürek discusses what our meaningful visible bodily actions reveal about our language capacity. Conducting cross-linguistic, behavioral, and neurobiological research,
she shows that co-speech gestures reflect the imagistic, iconic aspects of events talked about and at the same time interact with language production and
comprehension processes. Sign languages can also be characterized having an abstract system of linguistic categories as well as using iconicity in several
aspects of the language structure and in its processing.
Studying language multimodally reveals how grounded language is in our visible bodily actions and opens
up new lines of research to study language in its situated,
natural face-to-face context.

Abstract

Pragmatic development requires the ability to use linguistic forms, along with non-verbal cues, to focus an interlocutor's attention on a referent during conversation. We investigate the development of this ability by examining how the use of demonstratives is learned in Turkish, where a three-way demonstrative system (bu, su, o) obligatorily encodes both distance contrasts (i.e. proximal and distal) and absence or presence of the addressee's visual attention on the referent. A comparison of the demonstrative use by Turkish children (6 four- and 6 six-year-olds) and 6 adults during conversation shows that adultlike use of attention directing demonstrative, su, is not mastered even at the age of six, while the distance contrasts are learned earlier. This language specific development reveals that designing referential forms in consideration of recipient's attentional status during conversation is a pragmatic feat that takes more than six years to develop.

Abstract

Evaluation plays a role in the telling and understanding of narratives, in communicative interaction, emotional understanding, and in psychological well-being. This article reports a study of evaluation by describing how readers monitor the concerns of characters over the course of a narrative. The main hypothesis is that readers tract the well-being via the expression of a character's internal states. Reader evaluations were revealed in think aloud protocols obtained during reading of narrative texts, one sentence at a time. Five kinds of evaluative inferences were found: appraisals (good versus bad), preferences (like versus don't like), emotions (happy versus frustrated), goals (want versus don't want), or purposes (to attain or maintain X versus to prevent or avoid X). Readers evaluated all sentences. The mean rate of evaluation per sentence was 0.55. Positive and negative evaluations over the course of the story indicated that things initially went badly for characters, improved with the formulation and execution of goal plans, declined with goal failure, and improved as characters formulated new goals and succeeded. The kind of evaluation made depended upon the episodic category of the event and the event's temporal location in the story. Evaluations also served to explain or predict events. In making evaluations, readers stayed within the frame of the story and perspectives of the character or narrator. They also moved out of the narrative frame and addressed evaluations towards the experimenter in a communicative context.