Barbara Tversky , Holly Taylor , Karen Emmorey , Sandra Lozano

Using space to describe space: Perspective in speech, sign, and gesture

Describing the location of a landmark in a scene typically requires taking a perspective. Descriptions of scenes with several landmarks use either a route perspective, where the viewpoint is within the scene or a survey perspective, where the viewpoint is outside, or a mixture of both. Parallel to this, American Sign Language (ASL) uses two spatial formats, viewer space, in which the described ...

Model-Based Reasoning in Science, Technology, and Medicine

Gestures Augment Learning in Communicators and Recipients

Communicators explained how to assemble an object or how to get from A to B to recipients, using speech and gesture freely, or restricted to gesture alone. Explanations were examined for uses of gesture and speech in conveying semantic content as well as narrative structure. For both tasks, communicators who explained using only gestures performed better than those using gestures and speech. Re...

Perspective in Spatial Descriptions

In order to describe a spatial environment, people must take a perspective on it. Previous researchers had claimed that in describing space, speakers take listeners on mental tours, using a consistent perspective. In contrast, we find that people use survey and mixed perspectives as well as route perspectives, and that the configuration of an environment affects perspective choice. We show that...

20 th annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing

s Review Panel Gerry Altmann, Sachiko Aoshima, Jennifer Arnold, William Badecker, Markus Bader, Ellen Gurman Bard, Julie Boland, Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Dianne Bradley, Holly Branigan, Diane Brentari, Sarah Brown-Schmidt, Marc Brysbaert, Petra Burkhardt, Helen Cairns, Katy Carlson, Manuel Carreiras, Craig G. Chambers, Harald Clahsen, Charles Clifton, David Corina, Martin Corley, Seana Couls...