Various enterprises and personal interests, such as Man-Machine Interaction (MMI), gesture studies, signs, language, social robotics, healthcare, innovation, music, publications, etc.

Category: Academia Page 3 of 4

Conferences, workshops, publications, etc.

Gestures in language development

Gesture 8:2 came out recently. It is a special issue on ‘Gestures in language development’. Amanda Brown, a friend who stayed at the MPI doing PhD research, published a paper on Gesture viewpoint in Japanese and English: Cross-linguistic interactions between two languages in one speaker. Marianne Gullberg, Kees de Bot and Virginia Volterra wrote an introductory chapter ‘Gestures and some key issues in the study of language development‘. Kees de Bot (LinkedIn) is a professor in Groningen working on (second) language acquisition.

ERC grant Onno Crasborn

Onno got a grant from the European Union that will allow him to start his own research group. He will investigate what happens ‘on the other hand’ in signed languages.

Guest Lecture about Designing for the Deaf

Wednesday, May 21, 14.00h, room U, Faculty of Industrial Design, TU Delft.

“Deaf people can do anything, except hear.” I. King Jordan

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doofheid
http://www.doof.nl/
http://www.dovenschap.nl/
http://www.annies.nl
http://www.fodok.nl/
http://www.nsdsk.nl/
http://www.gebarencentrum.nl/
http://jeroenarendsen.nl

Deaf Culture and Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT)
Gebarenverhalen
Mop
Kinderversjes
Corpus NGT (Johan)
Erkenning NGT
Onno’s Columns Woord en Gebaar

Some Products/Technology for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People:
Harris Communication (basicsbabywatch – vibrawatch)
Sidekick
AnnieS winkel mobiele teksttelefonie op BlackBerry

Suspicious promises of technology
The iCommunicator
Sign Synthesis
BabySign

Flash and Sign Language Videos
Click-Clack-Moo:
MobileSign: Good participation by Deaf Community

Een Mooi Gebaar 2007

The people with whom I am working in a project on Automatic Sign Language Recognition are organising a workshop. It is a national event, so the language is Dutch. We organised one workshop before, also called ‘Een Mooi Gebaar‘. The workshop is open to the public. All it takes is for you to register by sending an email to Anja van den Berg. Here is the program (pdf) and the full invitation in Dutch:

Geachte heer, geachte mevrouw, Hierbij willen we u graag uitnodigen voor de tweede workshop ‘Een Mooi Gebaar’, georganiseerd door de Nederlandse Stichting voor het Dove en Slechthorende Kind, de Technische Universiteit Delft en de Koninklijke Auris Groep. In deze tweede workshop zal het resultaat van het project ELo worden gepresenteerd. In dit project is gewerkt aan een Elektronische Leeromgeving voor het leren van gebarenschat door jonge dove en zwaar slechthorende kinderen.

Dit project is uitgevoerd in een samenwerkingsverband tussen NSDSK, de TU Delft en de Koninklijke Auris Groep en werd gesubsidieerd door het VSB fonds. In het project is een multimedia leeromgeving ontwikkeld om jonge dove en zwaar slechthorende kinderen effectief te helpen bij het leren van actieve en passieve gebarenschat. Het project heeft drie jaar gedraaid en we willen nu graag in de workshop de resultaten presenteren aan en bediscussiëren met het werkveld (onderzoekers, onderwijzers, hulpverleners, etc., op het gebied van gebarentaalonderwijs aan dove en slechthorende kinderen).

Naast sprekers vanuit het project hebben we dr. Hans van Balkom (Viataal) bereid gevonden om iets te vertellen over een andere interactieve leeromgeving voor gehandicapte kinderen en dr. Els van der Kooij (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) over haar onderzoek naar variatie in de productie van gebaren. De dagvoorzitter is prof. Don Bouwhuis van de TU Eindhoven, afdeling Mens, Techniek en Interactie. De workshop wordt gehouden op vrijdagmiddag 2 november 2007 in collegezaal D van de faculteit EWI van de TU Delft, Mekelweg 4, 2626 CD in Delft. De voertaal is Nederlands. Voor een tolk NGT kan worden gezorgd. Wanneer u hiervan gebruik wilt maken, dan graag aangeven bij het aanmelden. Het programma van de workshop is bijgevoegd. Indien u op onze uitnodiging wilt ingaan, verzoeken we u een e-mail te sturen naar mevrouw Anja van den Berg met vermelding deelname workshop Een Mooi Gebaar 2007. Aan de workshop zijn geen kosten verbonden. Voorafgaand aan de workshop worden koffie en broodjes aangeboden.

Een verslag van de eerste workshop ‘Een Mooi Gebaar’ kunt u hier vinden op.

Wij hopen u graag vrijdag 2 november 2007 te mogen begroeten. Met vriendelijke groeten, Dr. Emile Hendriks, TU Delft Dr. Connie Fortgens, Koninklijke Auris Groep Dr. Gerard Spaai, NSDSK.

Carol Fowler

A scientist called Carol Fowler has apparently done research that mine is related to. I was told so by Dominic Massaro, at the Visual Prosody workshop in Nijmegen MPI. He said that my findings on sign perception are similar to speech perception. Specifically, a delay of about 90 ms between detection and recognition, which I found for sign perception, was also found for speech perception by Fowler. But which is the literature I should consult?

At the Haskins laboratory she was part of a stream of research in the 1980’s that treated speech as articulatory gestures:

Carol Fowler[33] proposed a direct realism theory of speech perception: listeners perceive gestures not by means of a specialized decoder, as in the motor theory, but because information in the acoustic signal specifies the gestures that form it.

Workshop on Visual Prosody in Language Communication

I will be at the MPI in Nijmegen Thursday May 10 en Friday May 11. There is an international Workshop on Visual Prosody in Language Communication, organized by Alexandra Jesse and others (program). I am giving a talk called when does sign recognition start? on friday around 10.30u.

Maybe I will see you there?

Nyst Documents Adamorobe Sign Language

Victoria Nyst defended her PhD thesis titled ‘A Descriptive Analysis of Adamorobe Sign Language (Ghana)’ at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) two weeks ago (March 30). The local university website wrote a short piece about this Unique sign language in African village with high hereditary deafness.

example
One claim is that AdaSL is highly iconic; can you guess this sign? (source)

The village Adamorobe has a high incidence of hereditary deafness so there is a local sign language that both deaf and hearing villagers use. In the summaries there are some speculative claims about the different ways a sign language can develop or has developed in this case. Whether or not there is a large and isolated Deaf community is suggested to be the main factor in the arguments.

* Kennislink.nl provides a good summary in Dutch.
* The Foundation for Endangered Languages also has its eye on AdaSL.
* Promotors are Prof. Anne Baker (UvA), Prof. Maarten Mous (Leiden University)

XV Congreso Mundial de la WFD

The World Federation of the Deaf will be hosting their 15th World Congress in July 2007, Madrid.

Logo of the congress

The World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) is an international non-governmental organisation comprising national associations of Deaf people. It watches over the interests of more than 74 million Deaf people worldwide -more than 80% of them live in developing countries. The WFD was founded in 1951, during the First World Congress of the WFD, held in Rome. Such an early date makes the WFD one of the oldest international disability organisations in the world. Currently, the WFD has a membership of 127 national associations from the five continents.

Here is a very nice video with avatars signing what I think is LSE (Lengua de signos o señas española, or Spanish Sign Language). Whoever made these animations did a very good job. Both manual and non-manual features are synthesized quite nicely. The message is about the (apparently succesfull) Spanish candidacy for the 2007 congress.

MPI Lecure on Metonymy in Metaphoric Gestures

The Nijmegen Gesture Centre Lecture Series 2007 hosted a talk by Alan Cienki (currently at the VU Amsterdam as lecturer MA in English Language and Culture) and Cornelia Müller (Berlin Gesture Center) last week. I attended the lecture ‘How metonymic are metaphoric gestures?’ together with about 20 people. The talk and discussion afterwards were perhaps a little incoherent, partly because of most people’s unfamiliarity with the concepts of Metonymy and Metaphor (or was that just me) and particularly why they would be useful for gesture studies. It should also be noted that McNeill (1992) introduced a specific use of the words metaphoric gestures:

Hand and Mind (1992), p145: Metaphoric gestures create images of abstractions [as opposed to (iconic) gestures that exhibit images of events and objects in the concrete world]. In such gestures, abstract content is given form in the imagery of objects, space, movement and the like.

It is crystal clear that there is a whole world of thought (and fun) behind the word Metaphor. Big names Lakoff and Turner wrote brilliant books about it that are the stuff cognitive linguistics is made from. And to cap it all off, Mueller and Cienki lifted a tip of the veil about a hot upcoming book on metaphor in gestures too. It will be all I can do to stop from rushing to my online bookstore (as soon as I find time). We once had a serious young undergraduate student called Michelle Hilscher for a couple of months in our faculty. Then she was doing experiments with metaphor in images and I remember having the same incoherent discussions (from my part at least) about metaphor and iconicity with her as I did at the MPI now. Curiously, she is winning awards, and I am here blogging my PhD away. Time going to waste, I better get back to grooming my paper.

ps. If you can guess how many metaphors this post counts you receive an honorary mentioning.

Cuny 2007

The 20th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, 2007 is a special session on the Psycholinguistics of Signed and Spoken Languages. Nice names, nice titles, nice program.

They seem to have specifically invited veteran sign language researchers to talk to a broader audience. Some especially interesting ones (for me at least): * Gaurav Mathur and Catherine Best: Three experimental techniques for investigating sign language processing ** Eleni Orfanidou, Robert Adam, James McQueen and Gary Morgan: Segmentation of British Sign Language: Possible-word effects in sign spotting ** Invited Speaker: David P. Corina: Recognition of Sign Language and Human Actions in Deaf Signers * Invited Speaker: Diane Lillo-Martin: The sign language module * Invited Speaker: Karen Emmorey The psycholinguistics of signed and spoken languages: How biology affects processing

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