ArticleRoyal Society open science2020
Multimodality and the origin of a novel communication system in face-to-face interaction.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Self-reported expressibility predicts communicative success: Open dataset, validation, and simulation.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Can gestures speak louder than words? The effect of gestural discourse markers on discourse expectations.Discourse processes · 2025Article
- Tact Training with Augmentative Gestural Support for Language Disorder and Challenging Behaviors: A Case Study in an Italian Community-Based Setting.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Article
- Iconicity ratings for 14,000+ English words.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Conversational facial signals combine into compositional meanings that change the interpretation of speaker intentions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Phonetic differences between affirmative and feedback head nods in German Sign Language (DGS): A pose estimation study.PloS one · 2024Article
- Early or synchronized gestures facilitate speech recall-a study based on motion capture data.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- A general theory of consciousness III the human catastrophe.Communicative & integrative biology · 2024Article
- A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The Effects of Iconicity and Conventionalization on Word Order Preferences.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Gesture is the primary modality for language creation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Pantomimic fossils in modern human communication.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Persuasive conversation as a new form of communication inPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Do Great Apes Use Iconic Gestures?Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive scienceReview
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Face-to-face communication is multimodal at its core: it consists of a combination of vocal and visual signalling. However, current evidence suggests that, in the absence of an established communication system, visual signalling, especially in the form of visible gesture, is a more powerful form of communication than vocalization and therefore likely to have played a primary role in the emergence of human language. This argument is based on experimental evidence of how vocal and visual modalities (i.e. gesture) are employed to communicate about familiar concepts when participants cannot use their existing languages. To investigate this further, we introduce an experiment where pairs of participants performed a referential communication task in which they described unfamiliar stimuli in order to reduce reliance on conventional signals. Visual and auditory stimuli were described in three conditions: using visible gestures only, using non-linguistic vocalizations only and given the option to use both (multimodal communication). The results suggest that even in the absence of conventional signals, gesture is a more powerful mode of communication compared with vocalization, but that there are also advantages to multimodality compared to using gesture alone. Participants with an option to produce multimodal signals had comparable accuracy to those using only gesture, but gained an efficiency advantage. The analysis of the interactions between participants showed that interactants developed novel communication systems for unfamiliar stimuli by deploying different modalities flexibly to suit their needs and by taking advantage of multimodality when required.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.