Multimodal communication

Question 1

What are the components of a traditional view of language

Answer 1

• Language is of the mind
• phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
• Language is arbitrary
• Gesture is communication, not language

Question 2

What are the components of a multimodal view of language?

Answer 2

• Face to face communication involves the use of the body for communicative purposes
• The body is not only instrumental, it can convey meaning
• Iconicity is a central part of multimodal communication

Question 3

What is a gesture?

Answer 3

• A hand movement that does not have a direct effect on the world. instead it represents information about the world

universal and deep rooted

Question 4

What are the types of gestures and who proposed it?

Answer 4

McNeils 4 continua :
Iconic and metaphoric
Beat
Deictic
Pantomimes
Emblems
signs

Question 5

Describe the relationship between gesture and speech

Answer 5

• There is evidence people gesture for themselves (hearing people do the same thing on the phone)
• Gesturing helps people think better (people encouraged to gesture solved more problems correctly)
• Gesturing helps people speak better (people have lexical access problems when holding their hands to a chair, particularly with spatial language)

Question 6

What is iconicity?

Answer 6

• the meaningful relationship between human experience and linguistic form
  E.g. onomatopoeia
• leads to faster automatic access to meaning

Question 7

Describe iconicity in reference to sign language

Answer 7

Sign languages use iconicity much more than spoken language:

The hands (signing) are better than the voice (speaking) at mapping meaning and form together

Question 8

Where can the effects of iconicity be found?

Answer 8

• Picture naming task

studies testing the Kiki and Bouba theory = a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties (even among young 2.5 year olds)

Question 9

How is iconicity relevant to language learning?

Answer 9

• Iconicity helps with spoken language
  English-speaking children produce more iconic words earlier relative to later in development

Question 10

What are the two properties of language

Answer 10

Resilient properties = Those that are relatively easy to learn
Fragile properties = Those that are more difficult to learn

Question 11

What are home signs?

Answer 11

• A gestural communication system created by deaf children in hearing families without any sign language input
• Development of language like communication without a language model

Question 12

What are the resilent features of home signs?

Answer 12

• Gestures form a lexicon
• Lexical items are composed of parts, a morphological system
• Lexical items combine to form structured sentences syntactic system

Question 13

What is the Nicaraguan language?

Answer 13

• In late 1970s/80s Isolated deaf students began interacting and exchanging home signs
• They developed a “pidgin”
• Characterised by smaller vocabulary and more variable grammatical organisation