We are delighted that our ViCom PhD students Alina Gregori and Vera Wolfrum won the Student Poster Prize at MMSYM 2024.
Alina Gregori (co-author Susanne Fuchs) presented her poster on ‘Moving Meetings by Moving Prosody and Gesture’. The poster addressed how prosody and gesture interact to guide the interpretation of ambivalent sentences, using the Next Wednesday Question (NWQ) paradigm as an example. Two studies with English-speaking participants tested how the direction and timing of gestures in relation to prosodic accents can influence the perception of time. The results provide new insights into whether and how gestures contribute to the mental representation of time independently of prosody.
Vera Wolfrum (co-authors Carina Lüke & Simone Schaeffner) presented her poster on ‘The influence of linguistic input on the multimodal language processing of primary school children’. The poster explored how primary school children respond to modality changes between different sensory and motor combinations, e.g. visual and auditory. Two experiments investigated whether children respond more quickly and accurately to ‘compatible’ modality combinations (e.g. auditory stimuli with a vocal response) than to ‘incompatible’ combinations. The results show that incompatible combinations lead to longer reaction times, regardless of whether the input material consisted of pictures and sounds or gestures and spoken language.
Photos: Alex Lowles Photography