Tue 11th January, 11.00-12.30, M3 (room no. 1.05) Appleton Tower

Ashley Micklos (UCLA) & Yasamin Motamedi

Gestural communication in the laboratory

Homesign systems and emerging sign languages offer insight into linguistic systems in their earliest stages of development. Recent research on Nicaraguan Sign Language and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language have allowed an understanding of the processes at work from the creation of homesign systems to the more developed languages that are in use today.
Although studies of gesture in the lab have thus far proved informative experimental studies involving communication via gesture alone are uncommon and there does not yet exist a real understanding of how to implement an interactive element into gesture studies.

We will present the results of a study that was intended to inform future experiments exploring the evolution of gestural communication, as well as exploring how interactional properties facilitate the evolution of these gestural systems. We will describe a communication task undertaken by pairs of participants who were asked to communicate using gesture only. We found that when the gestural systems created in these pairs were transmitted along diffusion chains, the gestures in the final generation of the chain took less time to produce than those at the beginning of the chain. Furthermore, the signs themselves showed greater predictability and we found that the systems used within pairs were more similar in the final generation that in initial generations.

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