Abstract
Two studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between the production and comprehension of Aktionsarten (verbally expressed event structure, also called lexical aspect) in speech and gesture. Study 1, a qualitative/observational study, demonstrates discrete gesturing styles for each of the three major Aktionsarten categories. Study 2, a comprehension study, shows sensitivity to multimodal representations of event structure. Participants were both more accurate and faster at verifying the verb when gesture and speech conveyed compatible event structure representation than when they did not. Together, these results demonstrate a coherent conceptualization of event structure which supports theories of thinking-for-speaking in relation to gesture
Alessandra Zarcone
Professor of Language Technologies and Cognitive Assistants
Computational linguist with a background in NLP and in psycholinguistics, working on AI, NLP and human-machine interaction.