Our alumna Emily Morgan (Ph.D. 2016), who is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Tufts University, is one of the invited speakers at The 30th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, which will take place March 30 – April 1, 2017 at MIT, Cambridge MA.
Monthly Archives: February 2017
Separating viewpoint from mode of representation in iconic co-speech gestures: insights from Danish narratives
Graduate student Anne Therese Frederiksen recently published a paper on gesture form and function in Language and Cognition titled ‘Separating viewpoint from mode of representation in iconic co-speech gestures: insights from Danish narratives‘.
Abstract: During narrative retelling, speakers shift between different viewpoints to reflect how they conceptualize the events that unfolded. These viewpoints can be indicated through gestural
means as well as through verbal ones. Studies of co-speech gestures have inferred viewpoint from gesture form, i.e. how entities are mapped onto the (primarily manual) articulators, but the merits of this approach have not been discussed. The present study argues that viewpoint is more than gestural form. Despite connections between the two, many other factors may influence a gesture’s form. Assessing viewpoint from gesture form alone limits the applicability of gestural viewpoint as a window onto speakers’ event conceptualization and introduces unnecessary differences in the categorization of viewpoint across gestures types. The present study examines iconic co-speech gestures in Danish narratives, and makes explicit the means used to infer gestural viewpoint. The approach advocated here ensures that the notion of viewpoint can be applied in a principled way to all or most iconic gestures.
Anne Therese Frederiksen awarded NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
Congratulations to our graduate student Anne Therese Frederiksen for receiving an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant to study the ‘Interplay between Language and Cognition in American Sign Language Referential Cohesion’!