Artificial Intelligence - Special volume on computational research on interaction and agency, part 2
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Children and embodied interaction: seeking common ground
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
Designing learning representations around physical manipulation: hands and objects
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
Speakers' use of interactive gestures as markers of common ground
GW'09 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Gesture in Embodied Communication and Human-Computer Interaction
Tangibles for learning: a representational analysis of physical manipulation
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Gestures are pervasive in human communication across cultures; they clearly constitute an embodied aspect of cognition. In this study, evidence is provided for the contention that gestures are not only a co-expression of meaning in a different modality but also constitute an important stepping stone in the evolution of discourse. Data are provided from a Grade 10 physics course where students learned about electrostatics by doing investigations for which they constructed explanations. The data show that iconic gestures (i.e. symbolic hand movements) arise from the manipulation of objects (ergotic hand movements) and sensing activity (epistemic hand movements). Gestures not only precede but also support the emergence of scientific language. School science classes turn out to be ideal laboratories for studying the evolution of domain ontologies and (scientific) language. Micro-analytic studies of gesture-speech relationships and their emergence can therefore serve as positive constraints and test beds for synthetic models of language emergence.