Exploring Communicative Efficiency in emerging gestural communication system

Join Dr Jiahao Eric Yang, Early Career Fellow from the University of Warwick- for his hybrid seminar entitled 'Exploring Communicative Efficiency in emerging gestural communication system' from 12pm, Friday 19 April 2024.

"Human communication has evolved through interaction, with individuals initiating this process by creating signals to convey concepts. Although it starts with the individual, the precise mechanisms by which people create signals representing concepts remain unclear. Silent gestures offer a window into this process. When spoken language is not an option, individuals create communicative gestures to refer to concepts and combine these gestures into gestural strings to express a complex event. Despite their spontaneous nature, silent gestures exhibit consistent patterns both at the level of single gestures and gesture strings. In this presentation, I will explore how these patterns align with the principles of communicative efficiency, which suggests that an efficient communication system should allow for the successful transmission of information with minimal effort.

"I will discuss two experimental studies that investigate the link between communicative efficiency and silent gesture production. At the single gesture level, our findings indicate that individuals tend to produce gestures that are efficient for comprehension. Additionally, we found that an individual's socio-cognitive abilities affect their ability to accurately estimate the communicative efficiency of gestures and to produce optimally efficient gestures. Those with higher socio-cognitive abilities tend to provide more accurate estimations and produce more communicatively efficient gestures than those with lower socio-cognitive abilities. At the gesture string level, we found that individuals adjust their preferences for the order and omission of gestures based on changes in the information status of the intended meaning within the context.."

This is a hybrid seminar, that will be streaming via Zoom: attendees can view online, or attend in-person collectively at 52 Prichatts Road, Room 412 (G9 on the campus map).

This talk is part of the ongoing Language and Cognition at Birmingham (LACAB) Psycholinguistics Seminar Series. Discover more information about LACAB and its upcoming events here.