Multimodal-first or pantomime-first? : Communicating events through pantomime with and without vocalization
(2017) In Interaction Studies 18(3). p.465-488- Abstract
- A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A "dialectic" solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start, and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted... (More)
- A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A "dialectic" solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start, and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual (only body movement), and multimodal (body movement accompanied by nonlinguistic vocalization). Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional pro les of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenario. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/38c86c6d-8f98-4fb0-a1a7-e0ba30cb8b29
- author
- Zlatev, Jordan
LU
; Wacewicz, Sławomir
; Zywiczynski, Przemyslaw
and van de Weijer, Joost
LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2017
- type
- Contribution to journal
- publication status
- published
- subject
- keywords
- bodily mimesis, pantomime, multimodal origins, multimodality, language origins, language evolution, gesture
- in
- Interaction Studies
- volume
- 18
- issue
- 3
- pages
- 465 - 488
- publisher
- John Benjamins Publishing Company
- external identifiers
-
- scopus:85027680169
- ISSN
- 1572-0373
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- 38c86c6d-8f98-4fb0-a1a7-e0ba30cb8b29
- date added to LUP
- 2017-10-27 15:33:54
- date last changed
- 2023-11-17 08:13:56
@article{38c86c6d-8f98-4fb0-a1a7-e0ba30cb8b29, abstract = {{A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A "dialectic" solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start, and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual (only body movement), and multimodal (body movement accompanied by nonlinguistic vocalization). Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional pro les of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenario.}}, author = {{Zlatev, Jordan and Wacewicz, Sławomir and Zywiczynski, Przemyslaw and van de Weijer, Joost}}, issn = {{1572-0373}}, keywords = {{bodily mimesis; pantomime; multimodal origins; multimodality; language origins; language evolution; gesture}}, language = {{eng}}, number = {{3}}, pages = {{465--488}}, publisher = {{John Benjamins Publishing Company}}, series = {{Interaction Studies}}, title = {{Multimodal-first or pantomime-first? : Communicating events through pantomime with and without vocalization}}, volume = {{18}}, year = {{2017}}, }