SPP 2392:  Visual communication. Theoretical, empirical, and applied perspectives (ViCom)

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Biology ; Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering ; Mathematics ; Medicine ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461069267

The Priority Programme "Visual Communication. Theoretical, Empirical, and Applied Perspectives (ViCom)" investigates the specific features and linguistic significance of visual communication. This comprises sign languages as fully developed natural languages, which exclusively rely on the visual channel for communication, and visual means that enhance spoken language such as gestures. It aims at disclosing the characteristics of the visual modality as a communication chan- nel and its interaction with other channels (especially the auditory channel) to develop a compre- hensive theoretical linguistic model of human communication and its cognitive foundations. Alt- hough ViCom focuses on the investigation of sign languages and gestures as prime examples of visual human communication, the research agenda comprises the investigation of gestures in didactic and therapeutic contexts, their significance for language acquisition, gestural aspects of vocal communication and in the written modality, pictorial narratives as well as visual communication strategies of non-linguistic species and in multimodal human-computer interaction systems.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• International Connection: Netherlands, Norway, Spain

Projects

• Audiovisual Perception of Emotion and Speech in Hearing Individuals and Cochlear Implant Users (Applicants Dobel, Christian ;  Gast, Volker ;  Schweinberger, Stefan R. )
• Co-speech gestures and prosody as multimodal markers of information structure (Applicants Kügler, Frank ;  Prieto, Ph.D., Pilar )
• Compositional structures in chimpanzee gestural communication (Applicant Liebal, Katja )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Ebert, Cornelia )
• Exploring the limits of simultaneity: Encoding caused change-of-state events with classifier constructions German Sign Language (DGS) (Applicant Loos, Cornelia )
• Gestures and Diagrams in Visual-Spatial Communication: Methodological Tools and Applications in Mathematics and Logic (Applicant Lemanski, Jens )
• Gestures or signs? Comparing manual and non-manual constructions sharing the same form in co-speech gesture and sign language: a corpus-driven approach. (GeSi) (Applicant Bauer, Anastasia )
• Iconic metaphors and the gesture-sign interface in German Sign Language – corpus data meet experiments (Applicants Filatkina, Natalia ;  Herrmann, Annika )
• Lying, deceiving, misleading: are we committed to our gestures? (Applicant Antomo, Mailin )
• Modality-Specific Effects on Language Processing in Children with Developmental Language Disorder (Applicants Lüke, Carina ;  Schäffner, Simone )
• Multimodal assessment of dyadic interaction in disorders of social interaction. (Applicant Schulte-Rüther, Martin )
• On the FLExibility and Stability of gesture-speecH coordination: Evidence from multimodal production, comprehension, and imitation (FLESH) (Applicants Cwiek, Aleksandra ;  Fuchs, Susanne ;  Pouw, Ph.D., Wim )
• Parts of speech and iconicity in German Sign Language (DGS) (Applicants Pendzich, Nina-Kristin ;  Steinbach, Markus ;  Zaccarella, Emiliano )
• Pragmatic reasoning with (non-)visual alternatives (Applicant Bade, Nadine )
• Processes of stabilization in gestures. A media-specific and cross-modal approach (Applicant Ladewig, Silva )
• Representation of Pointing Uncertainty for the Integration of Pointing Gestures and Speech (Applicant Herbort, Oliver )
• Semantics and Pragmatics of Emojis in Digital Communication (Applicants Grosz, Patrick Georg ;  Scheffler, Tatjana )
• The Gesture-to-Sign Trajectory: Phonological Parameters in Production and Real-Time Comprehension (Applicants Perniss, Pamela ;  Schumacher, Petra )
• Virtual Reality Sustained Multimodal Distributional Semantics for Gestures in Dialogue (Applicants Lücking, Andy ;  Mehler, Alexander )
• Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language (Applicants Ebert, Cornelia ;  Hinterwimmer, Stefan )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Cornelia Ebert