Neurophysiological origin of human brain asymmetry for speech and language.

The physiological basis of human cerebral asymmetry for language remains mysterious. We have used simultaneous physiological and anatomical measurements to investigate the issue. Concentrating on neural oscillatory activity in speech-specific frequency bands and exploring interactions between gestural (motor) and auditory-evoked activity, we find, in the absence of language-related processing, that left auditory, somatosensory, articulatory motor, and inferior parietal cortices show specific, lateralized, speech-related physiological properties. With the addition of ecologically valid audiovisual stimulation, activity in auditory cortex synchronizes with left-dominant input from the motor cortex at frequencies corresponding to syllabic, but not phonemic, speech rhythms. Our results support theories of language lateralization that posit a major role for intrinsic, hardwired perceptuomotor processing in syllabic parsing and are compatible both with the evolutionary view that speech arose from a combination of syllable-sized vocalizations and meaningful hand gestures and with developmental observations suggesting phonemic analysis is a developmentally acquired process.

El gest nostre de cada dia. La gestualitat emblemàtica com a patrimoni de la cultura popular

El libro de Lluís Payrató, El gest nostre de cada dia, es un estudio escrito en catalán de los gestos de la categoría de emblemas de la cultura catalana. Los emblemas constituyen un recurso comunicativo autónomo de la palabra, en el sentido de que expresan un mensaje que equivale a una palabra o expresión. El autor incorpora a la investigación el repertorio gestual que elaboró Joan Amades en 1957. La tesis central de la obra es la naturaleza cultural y contextual de los emblemas, de modo que pueden tener un significado mundial en algunos casos y un significado local en otros. La contribución del ensayo es una descripción de los gestos según su función comunicativa y la confección de un repertorio de 108 emblemas catalanes. El gest nostre de cada dia [Our daily gesture] is a study written by Lluís Payrató in Catalan about the Catalan culture. It deals with a type of gestures called emblems. The emblems are gestures that correspond to a word or expression. The author analyzes the gestural repertoire that developed in 1957 Joan Amades. The central thesis of the work is the cultural and contextual nature of the emblems, so that may have global significance in some cases and in other local significance. The contribution of the paper is a description of gestures by communicative function and the production of a repertoire of 108 Catalan emblems.

Kehkeytyvät teokset

Kirjallisuusarvostelu

Secular Possession: Cinematic Iconography of Addiction

Addiction, and the experience of being addicted, is notoriously difficult to describe verbally and explain rationally. Would multifaceted and multisensory cinematic images work better in making addiction understandable? This study enquires how cinematic expression can render visible the experience of being addicted which is invisible as such. The basic data consists of circa 50 mainly North American and European fiction films from the early 1900s to the early 2000s that deal with addictive disorders as defined in the psychiatric DSM-V classification (substance dependence- and gambling disorders). The study develops an approach for analyzing and interpreting a large volume of digital film data: digital cinematic iconography is a framework to study the multifaceted cinematic images by processing and viewing them in the “digital image-laboratory” of the computer. Images are cut and classified by editing software and algorithmic sorting. The approach draws on early 1900s German art historian Aby Waburg’s image research and media archaeology, that are connected to film studies inspired by the phenomenology of the body and Gilles Deleuze’s film-philosophy. The first main chapter, “Montage”, analyses montage, gestural and postural images, and colors in addiction films. The second main chapter, “Thingness”, focuses on the close-ups of material objects and faces, and their relation to the theme of spirituality in cinema and art history, The study argues that the cinema engages the spectator to "feel" what addiction is through everyday experience and art historical imagery. There is a particular, historically transmitted cinematic iconography of addiction that is profane, material, thing-centered, abject, and repetitive. The experience of being addicted is visualized through montages of images characterized by dark and earthy colors, horizontal compositions and downward- directed movements. This is very profane and secular imagery that, however, circulates image-historical traces of Christian iconography, such as that of being in the grip of an unknown power.

Composition d'oeuvres pour hyper-flûtes et traitement audionumérique interactif

La version intégrale de cette thèse est disponible uniquement pour consultation individuelle à la Bibliothèque de musique de l’Université de Montréal (www.bib.umontreal.ca/MU).

Évaluation des jeux Kinect à l’aide du suivi physiologique, du suivi oculaire et des réactions faciales du joueur.

Les données sont analysées par le logiciel conçu par François Courtemanche et Féthi Guerdelli. L'expérimentation des jeux a eu lieu au Laboratoire de recherche en communication multimédia de l'Université de Montréal.

Chorégraphier le son

La version intégrale de ce mémoire est disponible uniquement pour consultation individuelle à la bibliothèque de musique de l'Université de Montréal (www.bib.umontreal.ca/MU).

Maternal label and gesture use affects acquisition of specific object names

Ten mothers were observed prospectively, interacting with their infants aged 0 ; 10 in two contexts (picture description and noun description). Maternal communicative behaviours were coded for volubility, gestural production and labelling style. Verbal labelling events were categorized into three exclusive categories: label only; label plus deictic gesture; label plus iconic gesture. We evaluated the predictive relations between maternal communicative style and children's subsequent acquisition of ten target nouns. Strong relations were observed between maternal communicative style and children's acquisition of the target nouns. Further, even controlling for maternal volubility and maternal labelling, maternal use of iconic gestures predicted the timing of acquisition of nouns in comprehension. These results support the proposition that maternal gestural input facilitates linguistic development, and suggest that such facilitation may be a function of gesture type.

Ballet

This solo exhibition featured Ballet, a filmed performance and video installation by Szuper Gallery and an installation of original archive films. Ballet engages with recent histories of rural filmmaking, with movement and dance, linking everyday farming movements with the aesthetics of dance. The starting point for this new work was a series of archival films from the MERL collection, which were made for British farmers as a means both for information and for propaganda, to provide warnings of contagion and nuclear catastrophe, describing procedure and instruction in the case of emergency. Gestural performances and movements of background actors observed in those films were re-scripted into a new choreography of movement for camera to form a playful assemblage.

Speech motor control in fluent and dysfluent speech production of an individual with apraxia of speech and Broca’s aphasia

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is typically described as a motor-speech disorder with clinically well-defined symptoms, but without a clear understanding of the underlying problems in motor control. A number of studies have compared the speech of subjects with AOS to the fluent speech of controls, but only a few have included speech movement data and if so, this was primarily restricted to the study of single articulators. If AOS reflects a basic neuromotor dysfunction, this should somehow be evident in the production of both dysfluent and perceptually fluent speech. The current study compared motor control strategies for the production of perceptually fluent speech between a young woman with apraxia of speech (AOS) and Broca’s aphasia and a group of age-matched control speakers using concepts and tools from articulation-based theories. In addition, to examine the potential role of specific movement variables on gestural coordination, a second part of this study involved a comparison of fluent and dysfluent speech samples from the speaker with AOS. Movement data from the lips, jaw and tongue were acquired using the AG-100 EMMA system during the reiterated production of multisyllabic nonwords. The findings indicated that although in general kinematic parameters of fluent speech were similar in the subject with AOS and Broca’s aphasia to those of the age-matched controls, speech task-related differences were observed in upper lip movements and lip coordination. The comparison between fluent and dysfluent speech characteristics suggested that fluent speech was achieved through the use of specific motor control strategies, highlighting the potential association between the stability of coordinative patterns and movement range, as described in Coordination Dynamics theory.

Performing performers: embodiment and intertextuality in the contemporary biopic

The actor’s body is of critical importance to the biopic’s representation of ‘real’ lives, to issues of physical and gestural resemblance, and in its role as the dramatic vehicle; acting out significant moments, embodying transformations. Through detailed examination of Beyond the Sea (2004), De-Lovely (2004), Molière (2007), films which foreground the construction, and constructedness, of life through performance and spectacle, this chapter explores the self-reflexive and intertexual embodiment of life stories. It focuses on the material details of performance in relation to distinctly contemporary strategies of film style and tone, and how these connect to questions of expectation and agency.

Combating shoulder-surfing: a hidden button gesture based scheme

This project describes an authentication technique that is shoulder-surfing resistant. Shoulder surfing is an attack in which an attacker can get access to private information by observing the user’s interaction with a terminal, or by using recording tools to record the user interaction and study the obtained data, with the objective of obtaining unauthorized access to a target user’s personal information. The technique described here relies on gestural analysis coupled with a secondary channel of authentication that uses button pressing. The thesis presents and evaluates multiple alternative algorithms for gesture analysis, and furthermore assesses the effectiveness of the technique.

Interação gestual em ambiente residencial: estudo, concepção e desenvolvimento

Control and automation of residential environments domotics is emerging area of computing application. The development of computational systems for domotics is complex, due to the diversity of potential users, and because it is immerse in a context of emotional relationships and familiar construction. Currently, the focus of the development of this kind of system is directed, mainly, to physical and technological aspects. Due to the fact, gestural interaction in the present research is investigated under the view of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). First, we approach the subject through the construction of a conceptual framework for discussion of challenges from the area, integrated to the dimensions: people, interaction mode and domotics. A further analysis of the domain is accomplished using the theoretical-methodological referential of Organizational Semiotics. After, we define recommendations to the diversity that base/inspire the inclusive design, guided by physical, perceptual and cognitive abilities, which aim to better represent the concerned diversity. Although developers have the support of gestural recognition technologies that help a faster development, these professionals face another difficulty by not restricting the gestural commands of the application to the standard gestures provided by development frameworks. Therefore, an abstraction of the gestural interaction was idealized through a formalization, described syntactically by construction blocks that originates a grammar of the gestural interaction and, semantically, approached under the view of the residential system. So, we define a set of metrics grounded in the recommendations that are described with information from the preestablished grammar, and still, we conceive and implement in Java, under the foundation of this grammar, a residential system based on gestural interaction for usage with Microsoft Kinect. Lastly, we accomplish an experiment with potential end users of the system, aiming to better analyze the research results

Alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico em interação com professores na educação inclusiva: descrição de habilidades pragmáticas

OBJETIVO: Investigar as habilidades pragmáticas de alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico durante a interação com suas professoras em salas comuns de escolas públicas. MÉTODOS: Participaram 14 alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico, de ambos os gêneros, com idade entre três e oito anos (média=5,9; DP=1,8). Como parte do procedimento, foram realizadas filmagens em situações de sala de aula e para análise dos aspectos pragmáticos da comunicação dos participantes, foi utilizado o Protocolo de Pragmática. Os resultados foram tratados estatisticamente (p<0,05 e em alguns casos p<0,01; foram utilizados os testes de Wilcoxon, Friedman, Kruskal-Wallis, Spearman). RESULTADOS: em média, o número de atos comunicativos expressos por minuto pelas professoras (3,4 atos/min) foi superior (p<0,05) ao apresentado pelos alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico (2,7 atos/min). Os alunos demonstraram predomínio de utilização do meio gestual, com média de 36,2 ocorrências, e de funções comunicativas menos interativas, com média de 24,1 ocorrências. Além disso, ocorreu correlação positiva entre os atos/min de alunos e professoras (p=0,01). Observou-se, também, que a idade e a escolaridade dos alunos não apresentaram correlações com o estabelecimento da comunicação nas díades. CONCLUSÃO: Foi possível identificar os déficits e as habilidades dos alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico em sala de aula comum e confirmar a influência exercida pelo professor no desempenho comunicativo de tais alunos. Estes dados podem contribuir para esclarecimentos de lacunas existentes na literatura e para subsidiar intervenções terapêuticas e educacionais nos distúrbios do espectro autístico.

Concepções de surdez: A visão do surdo que se comunica em língua de sinais

At this time, diverse views on deafness are present in society. Such views, in general, arecharacterized by theoretical disputes between communicative possibilities - either oral or gestural - based onthe importance of having appropriated oneself of a language code for the development of language, which isessential in the constitution of subjectivity of human beings. Thus, this study aimed to identify the conceptionsof deaf people had about their condition. To collect the data we used semi-structured interviews, applied toten participants who were deaf adult users of the Brazilian Sign Language - Libras. The interviews were taped,transcribed and subjected to content analysis. The results indicate that the conceptions of deafness constitute amultifaceted view on this condition, infl uenced by social relations throughout each person's life trajectories. Theresearchers perceived that learning Libras enabled deaf persons to constitute their own assertiveness as someonewho is different, with different needs.