PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Gesture communication, like prosody and paralinguistic voice features, strikes the atten-tion when there is too little of it, too much of it, or when it does not seem to fit the words or the situation. The present study follows the principle that gesture is similar to some aspects of speech, particularly prosody and parts of the lexicon. Description of visual gesture articulation is therefore treated as a conservative extension of descriptions of vo-cal speech gesture articulation. Well-tried models of speech forms and functions are de-ployed, together with accounts from gesture studies from psychology to robotics. Evi-dence is taken from video data of story-telling in Ega, an African language, and in Ger-man, and the adequacy of descriptive and computational models of the forms and func-tions of speech is discussed, with a proposal for the formal modelling of speech-like tim-ing of gesture articulators by means of Time Types in the Linear-Feature-Timing-Realtime (LFTR) model. Finally, an integrative model for combining visual and vocal gesture articulations into a comprehensive functional model of multimodal communica-tion is proposed: the Rank Interpretation Model (RIM).