Our project “On the Flexibility and Stability of Gesture-Speech Coordination” (FLESH) was showcased alongside the Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) at the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2024 (Long Night of the Sciences) in Berlin. Šárka Kadavá, Susanne Fuchs, and Aleksandra Ćwiek conducted an interactive experiment called “Stille Post mit Gesten” (telephone game with gestures), simulating the evolution of language. They were joined by Gillian Rosenberg from Princeton University, who is spending eight weeks with the FLESH team at the ZAS.
In this experiment, participants learned and imitated each other’s gestures before passing them on to the next person, allowing FLESH researchers to observe changes in the gestures as they moved from one participant to another. The team collected data from 60 visitors at the Long Night of the Sciences, which they will compare with data from another group recorded at the Inscience Festival in Nijmegen earlier this year.
