Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

10 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

Simultaneity as an Emergent Property of Efficient Communication in Language: A Comparison of Silent Gesture and Sign Language.

ABSTRACT: Sign languages use multiple articulators and iconicity in the visual modality which allow linguistic units to be organized not only linearly but also simultaneously. Recent research has shown that users of an established sign language such as LIS (Italian Sign Language) use simultaneous and iconic constructions as a modality-specific resource to achieve communicative efficiency when they are required to encode informationally rich events. However, it remains to be explored whether the use of such simultaneous and iconic constructions recruited for communicative efficiency can be employed even without a linguistic system (i.e., in silent gesture) or whether they are specific to linguistic patterning (i.e., in LIS). In the present study, we conducted the same experiment as in Slonimska et al. with 23 Italian speakers using silent gesture and compared the results of the two studies. The findings showed that while simultaneity was afforded by the visual modality to some extent, its use in silent gesture was nevertheless less frequent and qualitatively different than when used within a linguistic system. Thus, the use of simultaneous and iconic constructions for communicative efficiency constitutes an emergent property of sign languages. The present study highlights the importance of studying modality-specific resources and their use for linguistic expression in order to promote a more thorough understanding of the language faculty and its modality-specific adaptive capabilities.

SUBMITTER: Slonimska A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9287048 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Similar Datasets

Pantomime (Not Silent Gesture) in Multimodal Communication: Evidence From Children's Narratives.

Project description:Pantomime has long been considered distinct from co-speech gesture. It has therefore been argued that pantomime cannot be part of gesture-speech integration. We examine pantomime as distinct from silent gesture, focusing on non-co-speech gestures that occur in the midst of children's spoken narratives. We propose that gestures with features of pantomime are an infrequent but meaningful component of a multimodal communicative strategy. We examined spontaneous non-co-speech representational gesture production in the narratives of 30 monolingual English-speaking children between the ages of 8- and 11-years. We compared the use of co-speech and non-co-speech gestures in both autobiographical and fictional narratives and examined viewpoint and the use of non-manual articulators, as well as the length of responses and narrative quality. The use of non-co-speech gestures was associated with longer narratives of equal or higher quality than those using only co-speech gestures. Non-co-speech gestures were most likely to adopt character-viewpoint and use non-manual articulators. The present study supports a deeper understanding of the term pantomime and its multimodal use by children in the integration of speech and gesture.

| S-EPMC7734346 | biostudies-literature

The origin of language and relative roles of voice and gesture in early communication development.

Project description:Both vocalization and gesture are universal modes of communication and fundamental features of language development. The gestural origins theory proposes that language evolved out of early gestural use. However, evidence reported here suggests vocalization is much more prominent in early human communication than gesture is. To our knowledge no prior research has investigated the rates of emergence of both gesture and vocalization across the first year in human infants. We evaluated the rates of gestures and speech-like vocalizations (protophones) in 10 infants at 4, 7, and 11 months of age using parent-infant laboratory recordings. We found that infant protophones outnumbered gestures substantially at all three ages, ranging from >35 times more protophones than gestures at 3 months, to >2.5 times more protophones than gestures at 11 months. The results suggest vocalization, not gesture, is the predominant mode of communication in human infants in the first year.

| S-EPMC8669728 | biostudies-literature

Language learners restructure their input to facilitate efficient communication.

Project description:Languages of the world display many structural similarities. We test the hypothesis that some of these structural properties may arise from biases operating during language acquisition that shape languages over time. Specifically, we investigate whether language learners are biased toward linguistic systems that strike an efficient balance between robust information transfer, on the one hand, and effort or resource demands, on the other hand, thereby increasing the communicative utility of the acquired language. In two experiments, we expose learners to miniature artificial languages designed in such a way that they do not use their formal devices (case marking) efficiently to facilitate robust information transfer. We find that learners restructure such languages in ways that facilitate efficient information transfer compared with the input language. These systematic changes introduced by the learners follow typologically frequent patterns, supporting the hypothesis that some of the structural similarities found in natural languages are shaped by biases toward communicatively efficient linguistic systems.

| S-EPMC3497763 | biostudies-literature

AI enabled sign language recognition and VR space bidirectional communication using triboelectric smart glove.

Project description:Sign language recognition, especially the sentence recognition, is of great significance for lowering the communication barrier between the hearing/speech impaired and the non-signers. The general glove solutions, which are employed to detect motions of our dexterous hands, only achieve recognizing discrete single gestures (i.e., numbers, letters, or words) instead of sentences, far from satisfying the meet of the signers' daily communication. Here, we propose an artificial intelligence enabled sign language recognition and communication system comprising sensing gloves, deep learning block, and virtual reality interface. Non-segmentation and segmentation assisted deep learning model achieves the recognition of 50 words and 20 sentences. Significantly, the segmentation approach splits entire sentence signals into word units. Then the deep learning model recognizes all word elements and reversely reconstructs and recognizes sentences. Furthermore, new/never-seen sentences created by new-order word elements recombination can be recognized with an average correct rate of 86.67%. Finally, the sign language recognition results are projected into virtual space and translated into text and audio, allowing the remote and bidirectional communication between signers and non-signers.

| S-EPMC8433305 | biostudies-literature

Emergent sustainability in open property regimes.

Project description:Current theoretical models of the commons assert that common-pool resources can only be managed sustainably with clearly defined boundaries around both communities and the resources that they use. In these theoretical models, open access inevitably leads to a tragedy of the commons. However, in many open-access systems, use of common-pool resources seems to be sustainable over the long term (i.e., current resource use does not threaten use of common-pool resources for future generations). Here, we outline the conditions that support sustainable resource use in open property regimes. We use the conceptual framework of complex adaptive systems to explain how processes within and couplings between human and natural systems can lead to the emergence of efficient, equitable, and sustainable resource use. We illustrate these dynamics in eight case studies of different social-ecological systems, including mobile pastoralism, marine and freshwater fisheries, swidden agriculture, and desert foraging. Our theoretical framework identifies eight conditions that are critical for the emergence of sustainable use of common-pool resources in open property regimes. In addition, we explain how changes in boundary conditions may push open property regimes to either common property regimes or a tragedy of the commons. Our theoretical model of emergent sustainability helps us to understand the diversity and dynamics of property regimes across a wide range of social-ecological systems and explains the enigma of open access without a tragedy. We recommend that policy interventions in such self-organizing systems should focus on managing the conditions that are critical for the emergence and persistence of sustainability.

| S-EPMC6304945 | biostudies-literature

Nonverbal social communication and gesture control in schizophrenia.

Project description:Schizophrenia patients are severely impaired in nonverbal communication, including social perception and gesture production. However, the impact of nonverbal social perception on gestural behavior remains unknown, as is the contribution of negative symptoms, working memory, and abnormal motor behavior. Thus, the study tested whether poor nonverbal social perception was related to impaired gesture performance, gestural knowledge, or motor abnormalities. Forty-six patients with schizophrenia (80%), schizophreniform (15%), or schizoaffective disorder (5%) and 44 healthy controls matched for age, gender, and education were included. Participants completed 4 tasks on nonverbal communication including nonverbal social perception, gesture performance, gesture recognition, and tool use. In addition, they underwent comprehensive clinical and motor assessments. Patients presented impaired nonverbal communication in all tasks compared with controls. Furthermore, in contrast to controls, performance in patients was highly correlated between tasks, not explained by supramodal cognitive deficits such as working memory. Schizophrenia patients with impaired gesture performance also demonstrated poor nonverbal social perception, gestural knowledge, and tool use. Importantly, motor/frontal abnormalities negatively mediated the strong association between nonverbal social perception and gesture performance. The factors negative symptoms and antipsychotic dosage were unrelated to the nonverbal tasks. The study confirmed a generalized nonverbal communication deficit in schizophrenia. Specifically, the findings suggested that nonverbal social perception in schizophrenia has a relevant impact on gestural impairment beyond the negative influence of motor/frontal abnormalities.

| S-EPMC4332963 | biostudies-literature

Visual cortex entrains to sign language.

Project description:Despite immense variability across languages, people can learn to understand any human language, spoken or signed. What neural mechanisms allow people to comprehend language across sensory modalities? When people listen to speech, electrophysiological oscillations in auditory cortex entrain to slow ([Formula: see text]8 Hz) fluctuations in the acoustic envelope. Entrainment to the speech envelope may reflect mechanisms specialized for auditory perception. Alternatively, flexible entrainment may be a general-purpose cortical mechanism that optimizes sensitivity to rhythmic information regardless of modality. Here, we test these proposals by examining cortical coherence to visual information in sign language. First, we develop a metric to quantify visual change over time. We find quasiperiodic fluctuations in sign language, characterized by lower frequencies than fluctuations in speech. Next, we test for entrainment of neural oscillations to visual change in sign language, using electroencephalography (EEG) in fluent speakers of American Sign Language (ASL) as they watch videos in ASL. We find significant cortical entrainment to visual oscillations in sign language <5 Hz, peaking at [Formula: see text]1 Hz. Coherence to sign is strongest over occipital and parietal cortex, in contrast to speech, where coherence is strongest over the auditory cortex. Nonsigners also show coherence to sign language, but entrainment at frontal sites is reduced relative to fluent signers. These results demonstrate that flexible cortical entrainment to language does not depend on neural processes that are specific to auditory speech perception. Low-frequency oscillatory entrainment may reflect a general cortical mechanism that maximizes sensitivity to informational peaks in time-varying signals.

| S-EPMC5474824 | biostudies-other

Chemotaxis as an emergent property of a swarm.

Project description:We have characterized and quantified a form of bacterial chemotaxis that manifests only as an emergent property by measuring symmetry breaking in a swarm of Myxococcus xanthus exposed to a two-dimensional nutrient gradient from within an agar substrate. M. xanthus chemotaxis requires cell-cell contact and coordinated motility, as individual motile cells exhibit only nonvectorial movement in the presence of a nutrient gradient. Genes that specifically affect M. xanthus chemotaxis include at least 10 of the 53 that express enhancer binding proteins of the NtrC-like class, an indication that this behavior is controlled through transcription, most likely by a complex signal transduction network.

| S-EPMC2566203 | biostudies-literature

MyWSL: Malaysian words sign language dataset

Project description:Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals use sign language as a means of communication. However, those around them, especially family members like the children of deaf adults, may face communication challenges if they are unfamiliar with sign language. This issue has prompted numerous researchers to conduct studies on sign language translation and recognition. However, there is currently no publicly available dataset specifically for Malaysian sign language. This article introduces an image dataset of the Malaysian Sign Language (MySL) hand gestures used in everyday situations. The dataset, named MyWSL2023, comprises 3,500 images of ten static Malaysian sign language words collected from five participants (two males and three females) aged between 20 and 21 years old. The data collection took place indoors under normal lighting conditions. The MyWSL2023 dataset, which has been made freely accessible to all researchers, serves as a valuable resource for not only investigating and developing automated systems for hearing-impaired and deaf individuals but also gesture and sign language recognition using vision-based methods. The dataset can be accessed for free at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/zvk55p7ktd.

| S-EPMC10439288 | biostudies-literature

Syntactic priming in American Sign Language.

Project description:Psycholinguistic studies of sign language processing provide valuable opportunities to assess whether language phenomena, which are primarily studied in spoken language, are fundamentally shaped by peripheral biology. For example, we know that when given a choice between two syntactically permissible ways to express the same proposition, speakers tend to choose structures that were recently used, a phenomenon known as syntactic priming. Here, we report two experiments testing syntactic priming of a noun phrase construction in American Sign Language (ASL). Experiment 1 shows that second language (L2) signers with normal hearing exhibit syntactic priming in ASL and that priming is stronger when the head noun is repeated between prime and target (the lexical boost effect). Experiment 2 shows that syntactic priming is equally strong among deaf native L1 signers, deaf late L1 learners, and hearing L2 signers. Experiment 2 also tested for, but did not find evidence of, phonological or semantic boosts to syntactic priming in ASL. These results show that despite the profound differences between spoken and signed languages in terms of how they are produced and perceived, the psychological representation of sentence structure (as assessed by syntactic priming) operates similarly in sign and speech.

| S-EPMC4364966 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data