When navigating, people often rely upon a variety of geographic information sources to guide them to their destinations. These include maps, descriptions, or a combination of these as displayed traditionally on paper or through high-tech (handheld and in-vehicle) navigation devices. Maps provide a graphic representation of an environment and can vary in level of spatial (e.g., granularity) and ...

Abstract Increased attention has been directed toward utilizing visual modes because linguistic cannot accurately depict L2 learners’ metaphorical conceptions of their language-acquisition experiences. The goal this study was to investigate the mental images that Saudi EFL students may have in mind while learning a foreign language. To end, both verbal and nonverbal were investigated. An experi...

When describing routes not in the current environment, a common strategy is to anchor the description in configurations of salient landmarks, complementing the verbal descriptions by “placing” the non-visible landmarks in the gesture space. Understanding such multimodal descriptions and later locating the landmarks from real world is a challenging task for the hearer, who must interpret speech ...

The goal of our research is the development of algorithms for automatic estimation of a person’s verbal intelligence based on the analysis of transcribed spoken utterances. In this paper we present the corpus of German native speakers’ monologues and dialogues about the same topics collected at the University of Ulm, Germany. The monologues were descriptions of two short films; the dialogues we...

Audiovisual collections of narratives about war-traumas are rich in descriptions of personal and emotional experiences which can be expressed through verbal and nonverbal means. We complement a commonly used verbal analysis with a nonverbal one to study emotional developments in narratives. Using automatic text, vocal, and facial expression analysis we found that verbal emotional expressions do...

Automatic speech understanding in natural multiparty conversation settings stands to gain from parsing not only verbal but also non-verbal vocal communicative behaviors. In this work, we study the most frequently annotated non-verbal behavior, laughter, whose detection has clear implications for speech understanding tasks, and for the automatic recognition of affect in particular. To complement...

A manual search paradigm explored the development of English singular-plural comprehension. After being shown a box into which they could reach but not see, infants heard verbal descriptions about the contents of the box (e.g., "There are some cars in the box" vs. "There is a car in the box)" and were then allowed to reach into the box. At 24 months of age, but not at 20 months, infants' search...