Project Participants
Dr. Susanne Fuchs
(Principal Investigator)
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin
fuchs@leibniz-zas.de
Susanne Fuchs (ZAS Berlin) investigates the biopsychosocial foundations of human interaction and focuses specifically on physiological processes, such as breathing and motor control. Her main areas of interests are:
1) The interplay between motion, breathing and cognition,
2) Speech preparation and pauses,
3) Multimodality and iconicity,
4) Biological and social aspects shaping individual behaviour in speech production and perception.
She uses manifold techniques, among them optitrack, inductance plethysmography, electropalatography and intraoral pressure sensors.
Selected publications
- Pouw, W., & Fuchs, S. (2022). Origins of vocal-entangled gesture. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 104836.
- Fuchs, S., & Rochet-Capellan, A. (2021). The respiratory foundations of spoken language. Annual Review of Linguistics, 7(1), 13-30.
- Ćwiek, A., Fuchs, S., Draxler, C., Asu, E. L., Dediu, D., Hiovain, K., … & Perlman, M. (2021). Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 1-12.
- Fuchs, S. (2019). Vocal tract variations affect vowel sounds. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(10), 1043-1044.
- Żygis, M., & Fuchs, S. (2023). Communicative constraints affect oro-facial gestures and acoustics: Whispered vs normal speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 153(1), 613–626. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0015251
Dr. Aleksandra Ćwiek
(Principal Investigator)
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin
cwiek@leibniz-zas.de
Aleksandra Ćwiek is a researcher at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin and a PI of the project “On the FLExibility and Stability of gesture-speecH coordination (FLESH): Evidence from production, comprehension, and imitation”. She received her Ph.D. from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2022. In her doctoral thesis, she studied the diversity of linguistic iconicity and its role in language evolution and in language nowadays. She examined aspects such as iconic prosody, sound symbolism, and German ideophones. Her further interests include acoustic phonetics, speech-gesture link, cognition, and cross-linguistic research.
Selected publications
- Ćwiek, A. (2022). Iconicity in Language and Speech [PhD Thesis, Humboldt University of Berlin].
https://doi.org/10.18452/24544 - Ćwiek, A., Fuchs, S., Draxler, C., Asu, E. L., Dediu, D., … Perlman, M. (2021). Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 10108. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89445-4
- Ćwiek, A., Fuchs, S., Draxler, C., Asu, E. L., Dediu, D., … Winter, B. (2022). The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 377(1841), 20200390.
- Fuchs, S., & Ćwiek, A. (2022). Sounds Full of Meaning and the Evolution of Language. Acoustics Today, 18(1), 43–51. https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2022.18.2.43
- Wagner, P., Ćwiek, A., & Samlowski, B. (2019). Exploiting the speech-gesture link to capture fine-grained prosodic prominence impressions and listening strategies. Journal of Phonetics, 76, 100911.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2019.07.001
Dr. Wim Pouw
(Principal Investigator)
Donders Institute &
MPI for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen
w.pouw@donders.ru.nl
(A short introduction and selected publications are to be updated.)
Šárka Kadavá
(PhD Candidate)
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin
kadava@leibniz-zas.de
Šárka Kadavá is a doctoral researcher in the DFG project On the FLExibility and Stability of gesture-speecH coordination (FLESH): Evidence from production, comprehension, and imitation. She is currently based in Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin. Her research focuses on multimodality, on how different modalities contribute to the sharing of meaning and how they are coordinated with each other, and on how language-like structural features emerge in non-normative communication systems. She has also participated in a project developing Czech adaptation of MB-CDI at the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences.
Project Description
Speech and gestures involve an orchestra of motions working in concert for communicative targets. Several previous studies have shown that speech and gestures are coordinated. However, it is less clear how stable or flexible coordination is and how their coordination evolves. In the FLESH project, we assume that the coordination between speech and gesture is related to the meaning, and plays an important role in the semiotic process. The originality of our approach is that we take the motor properties into account. We suppose that stable gesture-vocal coordination needs to integrate the lighter mass and higher velocities of speech articulators in comparison to arm gestures. Moreover, in contrast to many previous theoretical approaches, we see coordination between speech and gesture as crucial for language evolution.
To date, gesture studies and language evolution research did not consider motor control in detail and focused on either vocalization or gesture, thus leaving out their coordination and multimodality in general.
In the FLESH project, we aim to change this by studying the coordination of vocalizations and gestures in the construction of meaning. FLESH is organized in four work packages. In work package (WP) 1, we assess the natural coordination tendencies of gesture and vocalization separately and in cooperation when expressing meanings. We assess which coordination tendencies are actually relevant for understanding the meaning of gesture-vocal utterances.
In WP 2, state of the art technology and signal processing methodologies will be used to investigate the coordination of the orchestra of multiple motions during imitation. With a high level of granularity, we will be able to study several gesture-vocal articulators that are involved, to see whether particular types of articulators are more likely to coordinate in meaningful versus non-meaningful imitations. In WP 3 we assess how gesture-vocal utterances evolve when they are passed on and imitated by a connected chain of imitators. This experiment will simulate language evolution in the lab. The focus will be on how coordination tendencies change or increase with repetition of gesture-vocal utterances from one chain to the next. In WP 4 we will artificially change the temporal coordination between vocalization and gesture in order to see whether this affects semantic processing. Additionally, gesture-vocal utterances will be presented that do not match in terms of their meaning to see whether novel meanings emerge. The FLESH-project will have an impact on the theoretical understanding of gesture-speech relations, the relation between meaning and motor coordination, and its role in language evolution.